...when they obviously don't want it.


I spent a chunk of the day working on putting the tail of a plane back together, after putting a doubler on a bulkhead, then had to put that on hold to help one of the avionics techs install some antenna doublers.  Maybe five minutes before time to clock out, I'm rolling up hoses and putting tools away, when the shop manager gets my attention...

"{JPN}, I need your expert advice..."

"Don't start a career in aviation."

He asked for my 'expert advice', and I gave it.  You would think that would be the end of it, but he then showed that he didn't actually want my advice, by continuing with...

"...{J} dropped a washer down in this engine, and now it's stuck... ....and {M} just flew over with one gear down and two up."



"DON'T START A CAREER IN AVIATION!"

{J} had to but in with "TOO LATE!"


I gave {J} a suggestion on how to dislodge the washer, and two minutes later he had it out.  Fifteen minutes later, I clocked out, and {M} still hadn't taxied in, so I didn't get sucked into putting a plane on jacks and trying to figure out why the uplock hook wasn't keeping one of the mains retracted.

Never give advice

Wise men don't need it, fools won't take it.

People want affirmation of a decision they have already made.

I have a few friends like that. Ask for advice on guns or something mechanical and do the complete opposite anyway and wonder why it cost more.

This.

try telling the owner of a GA airplane that it has been landed gear-up previously.

"you're wrong", "It can't be",   "there's nothing in the logbooks",  "my mechanic did a thorough pre-purchase inspection."  "I've owned it for ten years".

I can show them all kinds of physical evidence, but they still refuse to believe me.   They don't want to admit they were duped and their aircraft is worth 10-20 grand less than they thought.


I had one hell of a time convincing an owner that the 6 inch diameter holes someone cut into the bottom skins of his aircraft for photography, needed better repair than speed tape over them.  There was no reinforcement of any kind and someone also drilled 1/4" holes in bulkheads and spars to support the cameras.

I work with a guy that used to run a paint shop.  He's got some stories about starting to strip a plane, then finding bondo.  The first time it happened, they kept stripping (to see how bad it was), then called the customer.  The customer threatened to sue, claiming that the paint shop had left the plane outside in a hailstorm and was trying to pass it off as previous damage.  From that point on, any time bondo started appearing during the stripping process, they stopped stripping, rinsed the stripper off the plane, and called the customer (so the customer could see it with paint still partially covering the bondo).

Try convincing an aircraft owner that drilling a hole in his plane is not going to result in the FAA permanently grounding it if they see the hole, because the STC drawings say to put a hole of that size at that location.  Lucky me.  The guy's plane already had one or two STCs on it, but he thought an STC was an aviation form of a patent (For example: Company XYZ is granted an STC to put IO-740-J72 engines on the left wing of the Fokker StarSwallow.  No other company is allowed to install that particular engine on that particular model of airframe, and to keep the trade secrets of how the installation is done, even the FAA is kept completely in the dark about the steps involved in the installation.).

Had a new owner of an older Baron come in for his first annual.  I start the structural inspection and find all kinds of horrible repairs.   I dig deeper and find damage all the way to the spars.

Owner accuses me of lying and trying to hide shop-induced damage.   Says his aircraft is accident free.

I google his N-number and find photos of it after a nasty gear-up and later of it dumped into a ditch, after running through a steel fence when the pilot landed waaaay long.

At $24,000 into the annual and the repair estimate climbing like a Saturn-5, he pulled it and later scrapped it.   I think he paid close to $250,000 for it.

He spent that kind of money while doing absolutely no fucking research at all.   Always wondered where he got his money.

At Colemill, our code word for those planes was "creampuff".  

Everybody in the shop got a bonus for each Colemill STC that was installed in the shop (helped motivate everybody to get the planes out as quickly as possible).  Occasionally, the company salesman would have to include an annual inspection to make a sale.  When the annual was included, we still got the bonus for the STC install, but the IA that signed off the annual was the only person to see a bonus for the annual, while the mechanics got stuck with fixing what was found and the plane tied up space in the hangar while the squawks were being cleared.

Naturally, this led to some grumbling when Ralph would come down to the maintenance hangar to check on the progress of an install and mention an annual inspection while telling us what he had scheduled to be coming in for the next month or so.  Once in a while, he would respond to the grumbling with "oh, this one won't be much of an annual, since it's a real creampuff."  Turned out to be around 90% odds that when Ralph said "creampuff", the plane would show up with paint and interior done in the last six months (right before the current owner bought it), engines at TBO, and the rest of the airframe in the condition an experienced mechanic would expect in that situation.

Having money, in no way implies that the owner knows anything about buying planes.

Bingo.

I learned to fly at Colemill. 
Reading this brought back memories.. 

My first ride in a plane, was in a Super Cub at a grass field at (if my memory isn't off) White Lake, NC, when I was 8 years old.

My second and third rides were in one of Colemill's 172s at Cornelia Fort, not long after the Super Cub ride.  Flew over my house, on at least one of them.

Didn't go back to Colemill for about 26 years, then went to work there and stayed until all the mechanics and pilots were laid off during the shut down.  Lots of memories at that place.  Metro Nashville Parks Department owns the property, now, and has made it part of the Greenway System.

Did they try giving it a fresh coat of paint?

Apparently, "New paint" fixes a lot of serious airframe problems.

Fortunately, I have never worked for a shop that was that bad, but I have worked on a few planes that had been recently purchased and looked like they had come from a company like that.

One required a dead blow hammer to get the seats in the aft cabin to "slide" on the seat rails.  Turned out the floor structure was collapsed about half an inch to three quarters of an inch, in the middle of the seat rails (that was not a fun repair).  Must have been some heavy cargo on a few trips.

I drained the oil on that same plane, when it came into the shop.  Pilot had picked it up at the seller's airport, spent a couple hours in the air, then left it on our ramp.  Sat for about a week before it was towed into the shop, and they didn't run it to warm the engines up, so I was expecting the oil to be draining for a while.  Pulled the plug, then turned around to wipe the oil off my socket and put it back in the drawer, got the tools out to start pulling the lower spark plugs, and...  ...the oil wasn't draining.  Even if the engines had been hot, it shouldn't have drained that fast, so I thought maybe the sump had been almost empty.  Checked the bucket, and it had about as much oil (or something that looked like oil) as normal for having drained an engine.  The stuff was as thin as watered down black coffee.

Same thing on the other engine.

When I checked the turbos, one was seized, and the other was difficult to turn.  The pilot was asked if he noticed anything strange about the engines (manifold pressure, oil pressure, etc), and he said it all seemed normal for a plane with a fair amount of time on the engines.  More than likely, the 5W-10 oil (or whatever it was) drained from the turbo bearings the second the engines were shut down, leaving the hot turbos spinning on a faint memory of oil.

Couldn't say much positive about the rest of the plane, other than "it flew in".

Or an extra seam in the skin.   Much easier to notice when it's something like one wing having more seams than the other wing.