Everything Was All Signed Off, But....

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M

MIflyer

1st Lieutenant
7,162
14,802
May 30, 2011
Cape Canaveral
One day a nuclear weapons expert in the US was told there was an urgent situation in Germany that demanded his immediate attention. So they stuck him in the back seat of a B-57 and flew him across the Atlantic.

Arriving in Germany they showed him the object of their concern. A nuclear weapon had been opened for inspection and the electronics was found to be covered with mold. He inspected the bomb and determined that no, it was not going to go off by itself due to the mold. Then he examined the quality control and quality assurance sign offs and saw that they had all agreed that everything was fine with the weapon. But they had only missed one thing.

Inside the bomb casing was a half-eaten ham sandwich.
 
With, or without mustard ?
Makes a heck of a situational difference you know - with mould present, it could have caused a major biological hazard!!!
 
I'm not sure, but after a few hairy moments, years ago, when my off-roading Land Rover's steering literally "locked up", preventing the steering from turning from any particular position ( it once went straight ahead across a road junction, instead of turning left ! ), I eventually found the problem.
An 18mm socket I'd lost, somewhere unknown, quite some time an many, many miles before these incidents, had apparently lodged itself on the front cross member and, at this point, had dislodged itself, and fallen onto the steering linkage on the left side. Certain movements / angles of said linkage caused the 18mm ( Snap On tools ! ) socket to wedge against the steering arm linkage joint, jamming the steering solid !
A change of underwear, and removal of the offending 18mm socket, solved the problem, and the trusty Land Rover continued to roam far and wide for years after !
 
There was an Ercoupe that crashed back in November. The pilot reported that the ailerons locked up in a turn. We in the Ercoupe community have been discussing what could cause that and one owner reported he had looked under the baggage compartment just after he bought the airplane and found a crescent wrench up against the aileron controls.

When they took the Apollo 1 command module apart after the fire they found a wrench that had been dropped down into the wiring. That did not cause the fire but it was indicative of what carelessness had occurred. Of course a friend of mine who had worked on the program said they had attached all kinds of labels and signs all over the inside of the command module with a glue they called "gorilla snot." Turned out it was highly flammable.

A friend told me that on the street where he lived in OK some people rebuilt the engine on a car. When they tried to start it, it would not turn over. They smoked the tires up and down the street trying to push start it. Finally they took the engine back apart. They found they had left a can of grease atop one of the pistons.

And of course everyone has heard of the guy who bought a new Cadillac and was annoyed by a rattle that kept showing up. After taking it back to the dealer a number of times he finally opened up one of the doors and found soft drink bottle with a note inside: "So you finally found it, you rich SOB."
 
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VMA(AW)-242, based at MCAS El Toro, Ca suffered an aircraft loss 18 October 1983 - an A-6E TRAM (equipped with the laser/FLIR turret) had the elevators lock in position in a shallow dive at the Yuma bombing range. After multiple attempts to free the controls the aircrew ejected safely and the aircraft crashed. Investigators found a bent pair of pliers wedged in the elevator control linkage.

The pliers bore the tool ID markings of the Naval Air Rework Facility in Virginia that had just done a major overhaul of the aircraft... it had flown cross-country to California with the pliers loose inside the aft fuselage, and then out to the bombing range.

-242 was my squadron at the time - and they had me help ID some of the wreckage related to the TRAM system (intermediate-level repair of which was my MOS).
 
At Tinker AFB, OC-ALC, A-7's would come in for some work and afterwards the pilot would do a roll and all sorts of stuff would fall from the floor. They were looking into putting a kind of bag in the bottom of the cockpit to catch those kinds of things.
 
I read they found all sorts of junk and tools flying around in the new-build KC-46As. That was a serious enough issue to make the USAF stop accepting them until that problem was sorted out. I also read that Boeing found the fixed-price contract for that plane caused them problems. Hard to understand; they should have known by then what it costs to build a 767. Boeing is lucky that they always find in the US armed forces willing customers for planes that are no longer commercially viable for them. Does anybody remember the engine shenanigans that gave Boeing the AWACS contract for a 707 derivative over the technically superior DC 8-62-based Douglas offer?
 
When I was a USAF munitions specialist in the 60's we each had our own tools, inventoried with serial numbers.
It was similar in Army Aviation in the early 70's.
If a tool showed up somewhere it shouldn't have been, they could trace it back to it's source.
I'm surprised they would have changed that.
 
In my day (retired from the USAF in 2000) each tool was etched with the ID of the kit it belonged to. The kits were inventoried when checked out of the tool crib by the user to assure everything was present. When turned back in, a tool crib attendant performed the same check. The big roll around tool boxes were too big to take in and out of the tool crib, so they stayed in the truck or at the plane and were inventoried on location at shift change and before aircraft launch.

The toolbox trays and drawers had foam rubber inserts with cutouts for each screwdriver, socket, etc. so you could spot something missing right away.

Food or drink when working inside an aircraft was prohibited.

I used to work with a former nuke weapon man. He told me they were indoctrinated from the first days of training to be fanatically thorough about housekeeping. When you opened up even the oldest bombs they looked new inside. (All nukes have to opened periodically because there are batteries, pyrotechnics, etc. with lifespan limits.) Likewise, all toolboxes and work tables were immaculate. You could eat off any surface in the shop. I guess the ham sandwich guy took that a little too much to heart.

Incidentally, this nuke guy had served in Turkey, and said the possibility of the base (and its nuclear arsenal) getting overrun by hostiles was always a concern. To that end, each nuke had a control (I think it was a T handle) they could activate to internally damage the bomb in an emergency. He wouldn't say what exactly it did, but it rendered the weapon useless. Another security feature in all US nukes is a set of booby traps for anyone attempting to disassemble the weapon. Again, the guy wouldn't go into detail, but would only say that you need to follow the book procedure EXACTLY. Maybe screws have to be loosened in a specific order. I don't know. If you get it wrong, the weapon damages itself and has to go to depot for repair.
 
A retired officer told me that when they pulled the Jupiter missiles out of Turkey, one got sent to the USAF Museum at Cape Canaveral. He was examining it just after it arrived and noted that it still had a warhead. He called the nuke people in TX and read them the part numbers and serial numbers. Their response was, "Put guards on it! We are getting on the airplane right now!" That was not a museum piece.
 
mikemike said:
That was a serious enough issue to make the USAF stop accepting them until that problem was sorted out. I also read that Boeing found the fixed-price contract for that plane caused them problems.
Click to expand...

The original idea of buying converted airliners from Boeing came just after 9/11/01 when the company was desperately looking for a way to make some money during a time in which airliner sales fell off a cliff due to the WoT. Boeing submitted an unsolicited proposal to convert airliners into tankers, lease them to the USAF for a number of years, and then take them back when the lease ended and convert them back to airliners. This would have enabled Boeing to keep building airliners and then get them back when the market recovered. True to the way things are done in DC, the mere fact that a major company proposed it meant it had to be given serious consideration. Sen McCain got involved and killed the idea.

Then came the KC-46 competition, which Lockheed Martin and Airbus won. This was unacceptable and eventually they redid the competition and Boeing won.
 

That's more or less the way it was when I was in the USAF if the 60's.
I've heard all the horror tales about loose tools , etc. in aircraft.
I just don't understand it , maybe some bases weren't very strict about enforcing safety standards.
I know when I got out of the Army in 73, I could see that things were really slipping bad in where I was at in Germany.
If the Russians had decided to barge thru the Fulda Gap on a weekend in 73, they would have found 3/4 of the US Army sedated from booze, or drugs..
 

USMC (Navair, actually) procedure was the same - every tool marked, and inventory done AND SIGNED OFF at the beginning of shift and end of shift. If more than one aircraft (or major sub-assembly) was worked on during a shift a re-inventory had to be done before beginning work on the second item.

Each worker had a set of Tool ID tags - if he had to borrow a tool from someone else's box the tag went into the tool's space, and the loan was logged in and initialed by the borrower and the "owner" of the tool in that box's log - if the tool had not been returned at the end of shift the borrower had to log the borrowed tool into his own inventory, and contact the "owner" to confirm that the tool had not been misplaced.

If a tool could not be accounted for, everything worked on that day had to be re-inspected, and could not be released for use until the tool was accounted for.

Still, dishonest workers who "pencil-whip" the inventory logs still caused damage from their lost tools.
 
"Sponge count" procedures (based on that used in surgery) were employed on space hardware as well. But on one Ariane rocket engine when they quit work on Friday afternoon the tech put a rag in the end of one of the cooling tubes to keep small objects from getting in there. That tech was not there on Monday so another worker completed assembling the engine. Soon after launch hat rag stopped up the cooling tube, resulting in an engine failure and loss of the mission. How they managed to test that engine and not find that problem, I do not know. That particular type of engine used hazardous propellants, so I guess it is possible that they had already test fired it and were reassembling it after it was cleaned.

But on one Titan IV something even more incredible happened. Standard procedure was to wrap the wiring harness in the Inertial Upper Stage with silicone tape. But the tech wrapped the harness with the tape, INCLUDING the separation connector between the stage's 1st and 2nd stages. It got all signed out and close out photos were taken but no one noticed the error. The result was a mission failure when the two stages did not separate - but when they looked at the close out photos they could see the problem clearly. Furthermore, examination or previous mission close out photos showed the SAME THING had occurred and examination of the telemetry data showed the stages were hanging up, too - just not as badly as the mission that failed.

You can only conclude that the technicians, the inspectors, the analysts, and the Air Force oversight, NONE of them even knew how the hardware worked. This was in Air Force Space Command's "Watch This! This Stuff is Really Easy! Anyone Can Do it! You Don't Have To Be An Engineer!" era.
 
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