The Watermelon Run
Jerry had been assigned to AAR, a maintenance, repair & overhaul (MRO) center in Oklahoma City to install one of AIM Aviation’s complete interior kits on a couple of commercial airliners. The planes were in for what’s called a ‘C’ check, essentially a full maintenance tear down and inspection of the plane. The plane’s entire interior is removed, and the engines, flight surfaces, and electronics are all inspected, maintained and rebuilt if necessary. The fuselage is inspected and needed repairs made. Basically, if it’s on a plane, it gets looked at, spruced up, rebuilt or replaced. It’s a lot like a frame off restoration of a vintage car – only planes are subject to this every 2 or 3 years. Are you still wondering why air travel is expensive?
If you tuned in for last week’s inaugural installment, you know Jerry was our best on-site liaison mechanic. And you also know he was a character of the first order with a penchant for wanting to make people happy and an inexhaustible energy to accomplish it. On top of that, he had a great gift for storytelling.
Anyway, our new VP of Engineering had ordered me to OKC when both the airline and AAR started complaining about our lavatories not fitting in the airplane. They claimed the plane was going to be late re-entering service because of it. Any time a plane is late entering service, someone has to pay the airline a late penalty. Those penalties can be tens of thousands of dollars a day, and can easily wipe out any profit. So, off I went to Oklahoma – in July. Yahoo. They were on a nice string of 100º+ days when I got there.
I showed up mid-afternoon at the hangar and found all our guys sitting around twiddling their thumbs – including several of our independent FAA Reps and Jerry. I kinda liken FAA Reps to high end escorts – they’re expensive and collect no matter what they do. We had already installed over 200 of these interior kits on DC9s and MD80s, so I was curious to find out what the problem was. Jerry took me up to the plane while the AAR mechanics were on break and showed me the lavs – they were both tilted inboard like twin leaning Towers of Pisa. I looked at him with a puzzled look and said, “What the hell…!”
There were some other problems they had been having with the installation as well, but Jerry had been educating them and sorting it all out. He found the problems were usually caused by the AAR mechanics incorrectly installing interfacing parts, or not knowing the site process for modifying composite floor panels and such.
Back in those days, no two planes came off the assembly line exactly the same. Tolerance buildups created variations and once a plane flew, the fuselage would take a ‘set’ that would make it unique. It was rare for a fuselage to be perfectly straight. Over the years, in-service repairs also added variables our engineering didn’t always accommodate. So, some variation, adjustment or rework during installations of our components was fairly common. But this was way out of the ordinary.
Not knowing quite what to make of it, Jerry and I ran off for my introduction to the MRO maintenance managers who, of course, went off on me with the usual ranting and raving about our lousy product and crappy support. I told them we would be at their 7 am status meeting and then get right on it. Then off we went to dinner to try and brainstorm the problem and have Jerry fill me in on the rest of the personalities I’d be dealing with. If the guys I’d met were any indication, I already had a pretty good idea.
Next morning we pulled in and headed to the meeting. As soon as we sat down it started. Bullshit this, bunch of crap that. You guys don’t know your asses from a hole in the ground, the customer is really pissed and it’s all your fault and you’re going to pay all the penalties, etc, etc. Jerry and I bit our tongues, told them we were here to fix the problem and we would keep them informed.
We headed straight back to the airplane. Jerry and I decided to wait until the mechanics were off the plane, then up we went. We were sniffing around our lavs and interfacing support structure, and we both got to sticking our noses way over to the outboard side of the engine bulkheads when Jerry thought he saw something (DC9s had rear fuselage-mounted engines whose support structure was right next to the lavs). We decided we had to pull our bulkhead panel off, but we couldn’t get caught because it had already been installed per a closed out work card by the AAR mechanics. After making sure they were still occupied with something else, we pulled the panel and found a strange bracket – the AAR mechanics had installed their own jury-rigged bracket! That is a huge no-no on an airplane. Any FAA M&P certified mechanic could lose his job and license doing that. We knew right away this was the reason our components didn’t fit.
The next morning we waited until everyone was in the status room before going in. Instead of sitting, Jerry and I stood there. They stopped talking and looked disdainfully our way. “Morning, gents!”, I said cheerfully. “Well, we found your problem.”
With that, Jerry tossed the bad bracket across the conference table. It slid across like a beer down the bar, stopping right under the nose of the Operations Manager. “One of your guys fabricated and installed his own bracket on our installation,” said Jerry.
Dead silence. “I think you guys owe us an apology,” I said. “Looks like you have some work to do. Do you want to tell the customer, or should we?”
After a bit of grumbling, they conceded defeat and said they would talk to the airline rep. With that we smiled, walked out and high-five’d each other in the hall.
Now you’d think they might be a bit contrite about the whole thing, but on swing shift that night we found out different. Seems the floor leads and mechanics didn’t take too kindly to us finding their faux pas, so they decided to put our install on the back burner. Well, that meant Jerry and I (and our expensive escorts) would have to stay even longer and we knew our bosses would be screaming at us about that. We had to figure out a way to get the mechanics back on our side. Jerry had a couple of ideas and I was more than willing to listen. “There’s that lavatory floor panel that needs to be reworked, and their guys don’t know how to do it,” he said. “I can do that thing with my eyes closed, so I’ll volunteer to do it for them.”
With that, he walked over to the lead he knew was responsible for it and whispered in his ear. The guy simply nodded. Jerry got his usual big, goofy grin on his face, walked over to the removed parts rack, grabbed the panel and headed off to one of the vacant back shops to do his magic. It was ready for first shift the next day. Ok, one mechanic and his lead back on our side. Now, for the rest of them.
Jerry still had the best part up his sleeve – he told me he had an uncle with a watermelon farm outside of town. You gotta be kidding, I thought, shaking my head. “Jerry, how do you do this stuff? People crawl out of the woodwork when you’re around, don’t they?” I marveled.
He laughed, and exclaimed, “No, no! I actually have an uncle outside town! I’m gonna call him, go out there and pick up enough watermelon for all the guys on second shift. Then, they’ll l-l-l-ove us again! We’ll be able to get them to do anything!”
He was always so enthusiastic when he thought he had a great idea you just couldn’t say no. Besides, he already had me laughing. So I said ok. Not that it mattered – he was already halfway to the car.
A few hours later he showed up with two 35-gallon garbage cans full of watermelon – in a car. We rustled up some tables and butcher paper to put over them, and then set to work cutting up watermelon for their last break before midnight. They l-l-l-oved it, just like Jerry said they would. It didn’t take much to make a mechanic working in a 100º hangar feel better. And Jerry was right there with ‘em, sloppin’ down watermelon like there was no tomorrow. It was perfect. I couldn’t believe he had pulled it off with something so simple.
A few days went by and things were beginning to smooth out, although AAR was still behind schedule and our expensive escorts were still standing around running up a bill. We would literally sit around all day waiting for the mechanics to finish an install so it could be inspected, tested and conformed. On the afternoon of the fourth day of false starts, I finally announced I was going golfing. “Who wants to go?”
Well, of course the escorts wanted to go. They were getting paid regardless. It was 3:00 in the afternoon and 107º outside but we didn’t care. It was better than sitting in a hot hangar. We were on the 7th tee when our VP of Engineering called me. All the guys were talkin’ smack in the background trying to get me in trouble, because they knew we were supposed to be in the hangar no matter what. The VP was nervous about how long I was staying in Oklahoma City because they needed me back home to keep our latest doomed huge project on track for some ill-fated KLM 747-300s. I painted a rosy enough picture to calm him down and get him off the phone. I had gotten pretty good at talking bosses off cliffs… on with the important things, like golf!
Jerry was a great storyteller, but there were also a lot of great stories about Jerry. Hong Kong, Huntington Beach, OKC, Mobile, Amsterdam, Hamburg – it seemed he couldn’t go anywhere without leaving another believe-it-or-not Jerry adventure behind.
