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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One thought on “A Thousandth of an Inch of Trouble Episode 229”
After hearing the stories of you gentlemen rejecting airplanes for good reason, I thought I’d share my “So there I was” story.
In June of 2023, I was a career changer. I got on a 135 to fly a Citation Excel, and I was paired with, well, a grumpy dude. He was quite unpleasant. When I met him for the first time, I told him I was happy to be working with him and flying a jet, and as a career changer, I’m looking forward to learning from him… Big mistake. His answer was, and I quote: “I’m not here to spoon-feed you information; if you don’t know something, figure it out” (I’m really good on a Collins FMS because I had to teach it to myself). I have a very specific nickname for him now that starts with “F**king.” Anyway, about a year into my flying there, we’re in Reno, getting ready to come back to Southern California with the owners on the jet.
We go taxiing out, and I referred to this pilot to my friends as Forrest Gump. We start taxiing. He had just come back from recurrent in May. It’s July now. I had just come back from recurrent and my ATP Upgrade in June, and before recurrent, he kept hammering me, telling me I didn’t know what I was doing, and I didn’t know the airplane that well.
So we’re taxiing out. And we get about halfway down the taxiway from the signature or Atlantic FBO, whatever FBO we were at, go down to the end of the runway, and as we’re taxiing, he goes to apply the brakes, and the brakes fail. The tops of the pedals go to the floor. He freaks out. He grabs the emergency brake handle and yanks it, which isn’t the procedure in the Excel. In the Excel. The procedure is to take your feet off the pedals, then yank on the emergency brake handle. Otherwise, you put all the nitrogen pressure on the top of the master cylinder and blow the master cylinder up. He’s screaming at me to reset the anti-skid, which I can’t do until you stop dead. We are still rolling, and I’m telling him I’m not going to do it. We’re still rolling. I can’t reset it. This happens THREE times, and I correct him each time.
He’s not really showing that he understands the airplane. Here I am a year into this, and I’m handling this emergency way better than he is. So we get to the airplane stopped on the emergency brake. He does a little test, gets a little bit of braking action out of the pedals, looks at me and says, “Well, you know, maintenance is at our destination airport. It’s an 11,000-foot runway here. It’s a 12,000-foot runway there. We can stop with the TRs. I say we fly back to destination.”
In a very exaggerated movement. I reach out, press the event marker on the CVR, and say:
“Are you out of your F**king mind? How’s it going to look in the NTSB accident report if something comes flying on the runway and we can’t stop, or we overrun the runway there?”
He got very upset with me because I refused to let him take off. I really didn’t care at that point.
We sat in Reno for five days while we waited for an AOG team to come and fix us, and then he had the balls to tell management I was in the wrong and that he deemed it safe for us to fly back. Thankfully, my fleet captain had my back.
That’s when I started looking for a new job because I wasn’t going to fly with this guy anymore.
And, as luck would have it, a friend of mine asked me to come to his 135 and fly a Gulfstream G550 for him.
Anyway, enjoy your guys’ stories. Just thought you’d like to hear that one. Thanks for all the stuff you guys do.
Eric Fletcher