Maxor

The navy is a bit more indepth about structural stress at least on the shorter term maintence cycles than the airforce because the AF doesn't jerk them around by their landing gear/arresterhook quite so much. Most of this inspection is visual and centered on on looking for cracks or bending in anycase and centered mainly on wings and joins with the landing gear.


The airforce does have people that quality inspect and check equipment upon reciept I have never really been a part of this so I'm not sure how indepth it is and where along the manufactoring process whis is or would be on this type of purchase. Having been a part of a few phased maintence cycles and checks on various planes I know a bit more about that though being an electronics guy my knowledge of the tests that metals does are limited. I do know that a 1 year maintence cycle for a U-2 has the wingspars and wing root inspected for visible rips or crack in them and that they usually take off at least some of the paint on them and paint back over because I had to remove some of my wiring budles and one of my fiber optics connectors always gets painted over by whichwever new airmen they make crawl in the wing and paint it and the tech in charge always apologizes for my shop having to craw in there and replace it in a dark fuel smelling wing when it doesn't work after they get paint on it. There is an inspection for cracks on the joint where the landing gear meets the frame of that plane and for t-38 talons. Thats there on the 90 or 60 day inspection but not on the 30 day one of them for the U-2 is retarded and more or less encompasses chaging the coolant a couple of filters reseting all the nav equpment and changing the rear hard rubber tyres and is done on the flight line as often as on the phase dock don't remember which is which off the top of my head I think it is the 30 because it would fall in with the others and only when it did would they be taken into dock either the 60 or the 90 day is also very short and more time is spent removing everything equpment wise and the panels the turn around time on this maintence is expected to be something like 90 hours with 3 shifts going at it it comeing in on a mid getting panels pulled and drained days avionics pulls all their parts and starts wiring inspection. Crap in the engine bay can't be inspected yet because engines hasn't done their rollback. Tail may or may not be off the plane depending on how on top of things the crewcheifs are .. Swings comes in fixes wiring write-ups found by days and gets chewed by the crewcheifs that we are in their way because they didn't get eferything they were supposed to the night before at this time metals sends over their crew to fix all the screw plates bent panels and drill all the screws that the crewcheifs screwed - up (as often as not on the flightline because someone torc monkeyed them instead of having a brain. (yeah avionics probably actually did a fair number of them because the panels weren't off when we got there and why the hell would we wait on the crewcheifs when we've got screwdrivers and speedhandles.)
Then engines comes in and rolls back tests their engines we might be trying to run wiring along side it or not. Rush to put everything back together /finish fixing as soon as engines is done to try and not screw up the flight scheduale for the day after spend 3 hours hand spinning around the plane to set the inertial guidance system and another 3 hours balancing the weights on the control hours. (bastards made this electronic warfare troop learn guidance and control troop nonsense when they combined our carreer fields) Don't even really mind the control wire weights but no one else can be on the plane when its being done. The inertial guidance system spinning is retarded though becuase it'll update from GPS which is does every half hour anyways if it deviates more than 3 feet from GPS anyways but some-one (I know this guy he's a moron and deserves shot contractor now) decided to get the TO checklist updated to have it calibrated every 90 days to within 3 inches of where one of the markers on the base is as though when 15 guys are hand spinning the plane on its main gear they don't move it more than 3 inches in the 6 rotations it does during calibration. Refuel engine run connector check and so forth.

Mostly visual inspection and only of certain parts of the plane. By sheet metal on most phased maintence. Knowing that for long term structural stability a planes frame in this section under paneling needs to be 4.75 centimeters thick and both sides of it needs to be manufactored smooth not pebbled because vibrations induce stress at a pebbling point. I couldn't tell you and I doubt most of the airmen in the sheet metal (not really the case there are 3 or 4 used to be seperate shops and a couple of different afc's that fall under the auspices of that which we call sheet metal) section could. Its the sort of thing that doesn't show up on most to's or phased maintence their checklists but shows up on design prints and full maintence rips. I know that for phased maintence the average airment works off of a Checklist that would say something like . Inspect the 3 cross spars in the E bay for wear, chipping, cracking, or corosions. if needed remove excess paint. Step 2 inspepct welds rivits and joins for wear tightness and corrosion replace as needed. If in planes delivered over the course of 5 to 10 years about 1/3rd have pebbled surfaces and have been in the air for 10+ years I would probably figure that the manufactoring proccess changed part way through not sure if I'd have asked a TSgt. or SSGT about it and in my shop when I was in the AF one probably would have known 3 would have looked it up and the other 5 (whom in retrospect i consider shitbags) would have never bothered to look up in the actual tech drawings what is actually supposed to be and based on their own experiance say its ok some planes are pebled some aren't (there are alot of little differences on airplanes in the airforce especially in periphral electroncs systems like this between planes 2 and 3 tail years apart. not sure how true that is in metals and frames.). If it was caught on these planes It would have needed to be either on delivery (which I'm not sure how it is checked and in what depth per plane) or on a major upgrade like happened with certain planes being more or less remanufactored between Multistage Improvement Program and going fromone model designation to the next.


They would probably have been exrayed for internal cracks a few times as well but that wouldn't really show up mismnufactored parts and that is maily wing and wing root not body mainline where I am given to understand this was.

In many ways phased mainetence is mainly for upgrading because verything is taken off and making sure nothing is badly broken/replacing rubbed wiring. I know that most of the phase maintence checklists say look for cracks wear and brokenness on framework parts. I also know that no one on earth knows what the widths of every spar on a plane is supposed to be off of the top of their heads. So unless someone was going over everyone of these parts with a micrometer or ruler and checking width that would have been missed over and over on visual inspection and probably never checked the pebbled finish on the part is a bit more of a mystery to me but if over 1/3rd were pebbled especially if it was in some retarded hard to see location and especially since the only place its true specs were likely listed was on the sheetmetal frame documents for remanufacturing I can formualte how the people in phase missed it over and over no clue about acceptance though really.