Quote:
Originally Posted by gordner
Aircraft tear downs are a lot more fun and a lot easier when you don't need to reassemble it later...I have knocked a few on the head and it is nice to be able to just cut off the parts you don't need to get to the ones you want!
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But we
do need to reassemble it once it's at the museum. It just doesn't have to fly again, so that makes it a bit easier. Oh, and yes, it's going to the NASA museum at the old space center. It's only about eight miles away right now. We get three days to drag it those eight miles.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nostatic
wait, I thought you were the guy that arranges the blue barrels into letters. Now *that* is cool...
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Oh, but of course I am. The tooling engineer, if we have done everything right while we are at home, before we get there, should be one of the least busy guys on the crew. So we get to do all the fun stuff on site. It's actually a bit of an AOG tradition to spell out "AOG" with something in front of the airplane at some time during the repair and take a picture of it. I usually lay the letters out in masking tape and have the crew stand on them for the photo.
Don't worry, though - it's not all fun and games. By the nature of what we do, we do it quite often in some real third world "garden spots" under some pretty austere conditions, sometimes for a couple, three months at a whack. I've spent time in some really scary hospitals after having been bitten by or otherwise infected by some infernal local parasites, or because of something I've eaten, or for no discernible reason whatsoever.
I do get to some interesting places, though, so that makes up for a lot of that. And the problems are always different, with local conditions adding to the challenge. And yes, I do have one of the best jobs in the world for an engineer/tinkerer/mechanic/geek.
Here's my next stop. I leave next Friday, and I'll be spending a couple of weeks there. The on-site customer services rep sent me this, supposedly looking out the back door of the hangar we will be working in. The two white buildings right of center are the hotels, I think. Bonus points for anyone who can guess where this is:
