I've been in the business long enough to have seen all the above at least once. Bucking bars, celcos, hand tools of all shapes and sizes, wild life, diapers, hygiene products, food, hardware, it doesn't surprise me. I just don't get why some people's kids have their heads that far up their ass. I get human factors, long hours, phone rings, stock trading, wife is being a bitch etc. But really has complacency not been the reason all along.

This goes for flightcrews as well as maintenance, when you show up to do your job, do your fucking job. Don't allow distractions to dictate the outcome. Oh we can have check lists, RII, ATAF, but really its up to us to police our own shit. An illegal repair ended the Concord program, know what you're doing, have game on when doing it. Nobody from the outside will ever understand what or why we are in this business, it ain't about skill, is about being focused. Want to daydream, drive a bus, or work on cars. Make sure coworkers are on the same page. We fuck up people die its that simple. We save people's life's everyday if you think about it, lets keep that way.

Go hunting blast the shit out of geese, them bastards make a mess.

That is all, carry on.

While I was stationed at Luke in the late '70s, there was an interesting incident with an F15-A. The crew chief had left a full-sized breaker-bar in place after pumping up the JFS bottle in the nose wheel-well. Everyone missed it on preflight, and the aircraft took off and retracted the gear without incident.

When the time came to land again, the mains came down, but the nose gear door was jammed shut and the nose gear would not extend. The pilot tried numerous times to cycle the gear and get three greens, but no joy.

He finally declared an IFE, and prepared for an emergency landing The pilot came in low and slow, landed on the mains with the nose high, and "walked" the aircraft down the runway with the nose held off the ground until the speed dropped to almost nothing.

When the nose finally slowly contacted the runway, the UHF antennas took the weight of the aircraft, and were ground away like sacrificial sled runners. Otherwise there was almost no damage to the aircraft. If I recall correctly, the F15 was back in service in a matter of days at minimal cost, the pilot received multiple commendations, and the crew chief lost several stripes.

Had a King Air that kept getting complaints of a smell in the aft cabin, and line service said the carpet was occasionally wet between the cabin door and potty seat (later said the carpet smelled like piss).  Took a while to find the problem, after being completely unable to find a leak in the potty seat.  The aft relief tube plumbing goes down, under the floor, from the funnel and hose in the potty seat, then goes aft and turns UP as it passes through the aft pressure bulkhead, before finally exiting the aircraft.  If the potty seat relief tube is used while the plane is not pressurized, the piss settles in the low spot in the plumbing, and stays there.  If somebody uses it while the plane is pressurized, and doesn't hold the funnel's valve open for several seconds after the funnel is empty, the piss gets trapped (no more air to push it out of the system) in the low spot and stays there.  After a while, it dries and clogs the plumbing, which leads to assholes dumping full funnels of piss onto the carpet (and not reporting it) when the piss won't drain.

I was the lucky guy who figured out the cause of the problem and replaced all the plumbing (and cleaned up the mess from the aluminum plumbing that had corroded and leaked).  Then I found the same problem (but hadn't yet resulted in funnels getting dumped on the carpet) on the next King Air that came in for a phase inspection (guess who had to clean that one up).  At the next weekly maintenance staff meeting, I announced that I was through with being the plumber, and somebody else could check the potty plumbing on the three other King Airs in our charter fleet.

Found an all metal, precision screwdriver in th receiver/ transmitter of an APN59 radar once. Nothing spectacular, but who wants their radar to fry mid-flight?  Turned in to NCOIC. Never heard anything back.

All Tools Accounted For.  Tool and part accounting is a SERIOUS part of any service or repair.



 

Maggots! A shipper was sending them as cargo ( for fishing bait I believe) and the box got damaged releasing a bunch of them. The ramp guys just scooped the box up and didn't say anything. Later the maggots had climbed up into the overhead bins and dropped into a few peoples laps and drinks. We had to get the exterminator out for that one

I guess I lead a charmed life in crewing hueys for 15 years; I remember a 12" adjustable
wrench I found on a pre-flight inside the hell hole; belonged to one of the full time mechs
at the guard facility I used to fly from,,,,,oh well,,,,,

A BDU top from an F-16 engine.
A ENTIRE forms binder from an F-16 engine.
Depot's torque wrench from a gun system.
BADR (Big-Ass'd Dead Rat)

Not strange, but turkey buzzards are pretty spectacular when they get sucked into a turboprop engine intake.

I wish I had made copies of some of the hilarious MAFs our guys came up with.

We pulled a Sailor out of an intake of an F-14 in 1993.  Couple weeks later the same jet sucked another sailor down the intake.  Started calling that Jet Christine.

I can't find it right now but I have a pic of a cobra being removed from a Chinook.

a maint t.o stuck in the nosegear door after landing, big ass swiss army knife, multiple water bottles, pubs, maint flashlites, screws. A lot of dried piss and dirt on the floor.

Flat washer in the landing gear handle assembly of an F-4E sim.  Less than a day later one of the wing's jets had the same situation take place.

The best one I ever heard of was an F-4E that landed with about 40 feet of telephone line wedged between the radome and gun "chin".  Something about flying low along the Gulf Coast over a nude beach and not noticing the telephone poles and the wire between one of them and a cabin.

Shop rags on flight control cables in the aft equipment bay.  Yes,  lying on the cables.
All kinds of tools in the aft equipment bay, wheel wells, and avionics bay.

It would have been either a B or D model F-15.  A and C models do not have canopy hand pumps.

And there is no JFS bottle in the nose wheel well.  There is a hydraulic hand pump in the nose wheel well on 2 seat 15s that is used to open and close the canopy when the canopy accumulators are depleted.  The pump used is the same as the JFS hand pump.


And I have had to remove a breaker bar from the pump at EOR that someone else left there.

My brother found a rubber mallet inside a panel on a C-130 that came back from Guam. Had an A-6 go upside down one time and they guys spilled a big bag of M&M's in the cockpit  

You should see the floor of the Copilot/Gunner's seat in an Apache; it's like office max.

"Chicken bones in throttle quadrant"

Them College Boys sure dun pissed Me off a few times.





The Ol' Crew Chief

Made me think of this:







 

for some reason i snorted at that one.  the irony i guess

For about 15 years my family used to own and operate a Yugoslavian surplus military jet called a Soko Galeb. Great aircraft. Flew it to many air shows, Oshkosh being our favorite. We'd have it sitting out in warbird parking where people could walk around it and check it out. The shit I'd see spectators do around that aircraft was un-fucking-believable. We had a couple of 500# bombs along with 5" HVAR rockets mounted on underwing hard points. I saw some douchebag encourage his jumbo sized crotch fruit to sit up on and straddle between his legs one of those rockets. Keep in mind this isn't a real rocket. It's a shell. And this prick is getting ready to break it clean off its mount. I spoke right up.
But as for FOD, it was inevitable that at the end of the show you'd stick your head into each jet inlet and up in the jet pipe and find crumpled up paper cups, popsicle sticks, napkins, brochures... Once I found a rock! People just treated your aircraft like it was there own trash can. Literally! After that we had some custom made inlet and jet pipe plugs made. It still didn't stop. Just slowed em down a bit. People would actually dislodge an inlet cover to throw garbage inside and then put the inlet cover back in place! One time we were preparing for a flight at Oshkosh for an event called "Jet Days", if I recall correctly. It was hot out so we opened up the canopies and had our helmets sitting on the bang seats to let it air out while we attended the "mission briefing". (Private jet warbird owners just fucking love to pretend they're mil.) When I came back I walk up to see the front seat helmet sitting atop the wind screen as some stupid fuck is just easing himself down into the seat! I went apeshit! "What the fuck are you doing!? Who are you!?" "Oh sorry. I saw it was open so I thought I could check it out." Glad we always left the seat safeties installed until we were actually ready to fly. From that moment on we resorted to taping a data/history sheet to the nose and taping "Do Not Cross" tape from the nose to each tip tank to the tail. Most people clued in but you'd still see some people just walk right up to the tape, lift it up, and walk right under up to the jet.

Rod Stewart's bank statement....not kidding.

Roofing you'er house is safer than taking a bath, but the fall is farther.

Oh he is.      
Mice love wiring and especially fiber optics.  

We had a opossum climb on to some 848VDC bus bars once.    Everyone involved lost their lunch.

Pulled a skittle out of an F-22 wire bundle.

once helped pull some sort of large black bird out of the wing tip of an A-10. it was a bird strike. fucked up all the wiring for the chaff dispenser. got the wing tip off, and brought the fire department out there to spray all the bird parts out.

I'd like to have a beer with some of you guys. The stories we could tell!
Ha!

Old 2A390

I worked on/around Intruder's, it was an exhilarating but high pucker factor experience. I've dove many an intake on purpose and wouldn't want to go down one unintentionally. That being said, the first set of vanes on an A-6 engine is fixed (do not spin), if you keep your hands to yourself you'd probably make it (with soiled pants for certain). all the sparks in the vid is the guys flashlight and other stuff being ingested.






 
 
 

Found an extension and a couple of sockets laying in the engine cowling of an AH-64 once.

Had an aircraft come in with an unopened can of red bull between the interior liners and the skin. That's apparently the customer's favorite refrigerator.

On a C-130?
Yeah, that's pretty cold back there.

They wreak havoc on a nose radome too!!

F-5E prescription (multiple plastified pages, tied together with metal rings) after it went through an engine at take off.....

eta: not me, but some found smoked cigarettes and a glass of beer inside of another Tiger cockpit.. the Jet got decomissionned sooner because of this.

We make a lot of aircraft maintenance tools and GSE's at my business. We had made a batch of safety restraints for C-130's that had a huge "Remove Before Flight" flag attached. These were used on the top side of the aircraft and screwed in to the receivers and workers safety harnesses attached to them for top side maintenance. One of them was left on, somehow missed in pre-flight, and flew from Dobbins AFB to Hunter AFB. Somebody got an ass chewing for that one.

A BDU top from an F-16.

We have an engine core here at work that had a mechanic's tool box go through it (a full-on roll away tool box).  Hundreds of pounds of tools plus the box, like $h!t through a goose...  It looks like a Sidewinder went off in it.

 We use the core as a teaching aid now: "This is how Bob destroyed a million dollars in five seconds.  DON'T be like Bob."

Got any pictures of that?



 

Various tool like clecos, pliers, wrenches, scales, etc. in the AEB, avionics bay, gear wells, etc.

The most interesting was on an EMB120, we pulled a fuel panel during an inspection and a 3 d-cell mag lite fell out.  We poured the fuel out of the light, put in new batteries and it lit up, without hitting the switch, which tells me it was on when the fuel panel was installed.

Oh and the pilots' porn, lots of places in the f/c that pilot cut out pics in fuck books and hide them. One for instance, on the little round yoke covers on an Emb135/145,  pull it off and 99% of the time, there's a nudie pic.

no shit.  and tell how long it took to kick bob out the door?

I work for Boeing, so snapping pics while at work is a big No-No.




Several people joined the ranks of the unemployed after that incident.

This is one of my favorites.

Had a UH-60L come out of phase and during the MTF it had low Xmsn oil pressure. So the pilots decided it was probably an electrical issue and completed the MTF. They brought the aircraft in on night shift and started troubleshooting. Well when they pulled the Main Xmsn oil pumps they found them full of shop towels. It seemed that someone had not done a proper FOD inspection at the completion of the replacement of an input module.

I've seen porcupine quills in a 737-400 main wheel tire, lots of nuts, bolts, screws (even wood screws) in tires.  I used to see glass from runway lights sometimes, but haven't seen that in a while. Twice I've seen melted spots on wheel flanges from lightning exiting the aircraft on it's way to ground. One was in an A310 main, the other in a 737-700 nose-the main failed a conductivity test due to it, meaning that the metals integrity was compromised from the electricity .

Safety margin.

I was flying an EF-111 in England in the late 80's.  I was in Northern Scotland when I got an HF call from the base.  They asked me where I was and how the plane was flying? I told them where I was and the plane was fine but why do you ask?  Mx had done a tool count and was missing a wrench and it was thought to be in my aircraft.  They asked me to fly back to Upper Heyford "nice and easy" .  The flight back was uneventful.  When we got to the aircraft shelter there were lots of people waiting for us including the MX squadron commander and the DCM.  As soon as we got the plane winched back into the shelter and shut down they started popping panels looking for that wrench.  When they dropped one of the left engine access panels the wrench fell on the shelter floor.  There were lots of unhappy people, so lesson learned count your tools.