I joined the Navy in 1976. After going to the Naval Aviation Hydraulics school in Memphis Tenn., I was assigned to a helicopter training squadron. My duties included plane captain on the Bell 206 Jet Ranger. I would remove the tie downs, and the covers from the intakes and the exhaust stacks. I'd take fuel samples to make sure there was no water in the fuel, and connect the battery in the nose battery compartment. Another of my plane captain duties was checking the navigation lights, and caution and warning lights on the control panel in the cockpit. In addition to these duties was marshalling the aircraft in and out of their landings spots. Sometimes this could be a dangerous task, because the student pilots had a tendency to go all over the place.

Later on during my tour of duty there, I was transferred to the airframe shop. In the airframe shop I did numerous tasks relating to the airframe. Some tasks were: removing and replacing leaky actuators, removing, and installing the tail fin, tail boom, and fiberglas repairs on the the tail rotor gearbox cover. I remember adjusting the breakout force on the swash plate by adding or removing shims in the swash plate. I did a lot of corrosion control work, some of it was not too pleasant. The climate in Florida tends to be hot, and humid, a perfect condition for fungus to grow. The fungus grew in the baggage compartment a lot, and you have to get in there and remove it with solvent armed with a respirator, and rubber gloves.

In 1980 after signing up for a second tour of duty, I was transferred to sea duty. I was lucky enough to spend most of that time on land. The time I did spend on board ship lasted two or three months. I went to a technical school in Tustin, Ca for training on the hydraulic system on the Sikorsky RH53-D helicopter. I remember flying aboard this helicopter across country. We flew from Virginia to Texas, with an overnight stay at a Naval Air Station somewhere along the way. I remember the flight as being very cold since it was open in the back except for a retracted cargo ramp. The beat from the helicopter blades made the vibration intense.

I remember working on the hydraulic blade fold system the most. The system would continually get air in it, and it needed to be bled off. I also removed and replaced hydraulic components, help do landing gear extension and retraction tests, working on and testing the cargo ramp, and of course corrosion control.

At United Airlines I worked on primarily B747 aircraft along with other types of aircraft like the B727. I did a lot of overhaul work in the hanger. My specialty on the B747, was removing the leading edge pneumatic ducts, crossover ducts, and the APU ducts, and replacing, and installing the new ducts. If fact anything pneumatic, including the three air conditioning packs, and the ground connections. We used the scissor lifts as you can see in the picture above to reach the underside of the wing, and also the JLG cherry picker to get up to the openings on the vertical stabilizer. There were times when we would help the guys up in the cabin, remove and install seats, as well as cut and install carpet.

This is the NASA 747 shuttle carrier that I had the privilege to work on. There were a lot of corrosion cards which we had to remove panels inside and outside the aircraft. We cleaned, inspected the areas, and then corrected, or wrote up the discrepencies.We removed and installed some engines using the bootstrap method, and some aft flaps, and flap tracks.