I pulled the hot "on-the-air" synchronous signal amplifier out of the approach radar stack about ten minutes after sunset in the Persian Gulf while an aircraft was in the pattern landing.

Thankfully the guy on the stick was the squadron skipper and he landed just fine but it was risky.

The reason is long and complex but I was told by a whole string of people and shown on a diagram (that was wrong) that the sync amp wasn't on-line. They hadn't done maintenance on the thing so all four indicator bulbs were all blown. They got two different amplifiers mixed up and didn't know which was which. They had blown one in the primary stack so they were on the secondary stack ... and told me I could salvage an unused dark amp over there in the corner. I went to work pulling it out - that was the secondary stack's and was busy running the glide slope. Apparently one of the hardest times to land is minutes after sunset as the aircraft are flying around in the sunlight at altitude and come down into the earth's shadow to land on the rolling/pitching running deck of the carrier.

I could have killed someone - or a bunch of someone's - and destroyed the aircraft too. I could have killed the four or five people that I was helping who told me and then proved to me in their crappy documentation that the amp was out-of-service.

Expensive diagnostic equipment, broke one and lost one off the bucket truck in the same week.
I got a "You've been having a bad week try not to do that anymore...mmm-k"

They liked me.

NEVER TRUST ANYONE IN THE AIR DEPARTMENT.

Later on that same cruise the Engineers were having problems with the rudder - those big 20 ton things that keep the 1100 foot long ship from crashing into things and ask my help.

I kept my hands in my damn pockets for that one and said a whole lot of "I recommend that you measure this ..." or "I recommend that you try that ..."

Air Department came for my help one more time - this time with the system that displays the wind speed across the deck. This is important because aircraft need a certain speed under their wings to you know, fly and shit. The catapult is adjusted to make up the difference between this flight speed and the wind speed. The carrier can, of course, go faster to produce more wind if it needs to. In the Persian Gulf the winds are pretty steady ... but if we're flying a ten hour day we'd end up in Israel if we didn't launch upwind, turn tail and head down wind ... and then recover aircraft again. When you're heading down wind the wind speed ought to drop, when heading into the wind it ought to go up.

Scene set.

I'm in the main IC shop when all of a sudden the gyro alarm goes off. The alarm that never ever EVER goes off .... goes off. I wake from my nap and find that the whole damn IC switch board is lit up like a Christmas tree with blown fuses - about 60-80 fuses have blown in the compass, underwater log (water speed), the wind direction, the wind speed ... every circuit that combat systems uses to launch missiles back at the bad guys. WTF? While my guys are rounding up every spare fuse in the USN I start to think what would cause this. The only places that all the circuits come together is up in the flag and ship's bridges. The flag bridge is on the 06 level (six stories above the flight deck) so I make the 13 stories of stairs up to that bridge first. There's an idiot there with a screw driver and a bottle of Brasso (brass shining fluid) sitting with about 90 circuits worth of combat systems fuses pulled out of the pretty brass fuse board. Seems that it was hard to shine the brass with all the fuses safely in the panel so he took it upon himself to pull the live power panel (~300 volts of signal) and to pull out +180 live fused circuits blowing about half of them. I asked the boy "do you go to church services on Sunday?". "Why yes Master Chief" I said "set those wires down on your lap as carefully as possible and step away from them"

I figured if the lord didn't take him with all that power I shouldn't. I had three guys with rubber gloves and matting on the deck re-assemble the fuse panel and put it back in the wall. It took hours. Looked really shiny when it was done.

Later that night ....

Air Department comes to me asking if I have any spare fuses since my men have robbed every shop on the ship for fuses. I say sure. They replace their fuses while I watch them. I look over at the wind speed indicator and notice that it isn't moving off of 20 knots. I look outside and it doesn't look like 20 knots worth of wind (25 mph). I ask for a screw driver and put my finger on the needle - if the system is live and working it shouldn't/can't move ... it moves under my finger. I set the wind speed to 75 knots as a warning to everyone looking at the 50 or so indicators around the ship that the system is broken until I can spread the word. Of course you'd need about half a brain to figure out that the wind was closer to 5-10 knots and not gail force winds of 85 mph ...

I quickly climb the six flights of stairs to the Primary Flight Control and tell the Air Boss that the wind speed system is broken and to use the handheld backups. I drop down a flight of stairs and let the ship's Captain and Navigator know too. They had been flying aircraft for 8-10 hours that day and not noticed that the system was down, that the wind hadn't changed speed once by even a knot in all that time.

I ended up getting my ass chewed out for setting the speed to 75 knots as I could have hurt someone doing that.

I asked that the 10 hours of flight operations prior to that with flat out wrong indications wasn't the dangerous thing ... that setting the indicator to an outrageous number and within 20 seconds telling the Air Boss was?

Lesson learned - stay in Combat Systems where the smarter people work.