A Thousandth of an Inch of Trouble is all that stood between one airline crew and an on-time departure. Actually, it was a worn brake wear pin, measured down to the thousandth, that a mechanic waved off as “technically good to go.”
This week’s episode is a lighter one. It’s just Fig and RePete, no guest, trading stories while juggling schedules and a certain eye surgery on the calendar. Before the flying talk starts, Fig recaps a fundraiser for YL-37, the effort to keep a UH-34 Marine helicopter flying as a living memorial. Vietnam-era crew chiefs, dubbed “Ugly Angels,” turned up to honor thirty-three squadron mates lost in the war. It was, by Fig’s account, truly spectacular.
Then the real theme of the night kicks in: airplanes you keep versus airplanes you refuse. RePete walks through a Low Altitude Tactics qual he pushed through despite a caution light, a Paris battery-discharge light that kept recurring for weeks, and an MD-11 jump seat jammed at a forty-five-degree angle that maintenance wanted to sign off as legal.
A Thousandth of an Inch of Trouble: The Refused Airplane
Furthermore, there’s the coffee thermos that popped three circuit breakers on takeoff roll, and two separate environmental control system failures that nearly cooked Fig alive, once over Camp Lejeune and once out of Darwin, Australia. However, the headline story is the brake pin.
On a 737 preflight, the first officer found no pin sticking out where one should be. Maintenance measured it anyway and found one-thousandth of an inch of clearance. Consequently, that counted as “in limits.” Fig refused the airplane, ate the delay, and bought drinks for the whole cabin. New brakes went on that night.
The episode wraps with thanks to veterans, their families, and everyone still serving.
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