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Doing away with IFS?

scoolbubba

Brett327 gargles ballsacks
pilot
Contributor
My bet is cross countries will go the way of the dodo after the rona is over. Production hasn't ceased without 'em. Who gives a shit what kind of widget we turn out as long as we make more than we did last year, right?
 

flgator92

Well-Known Member
None
My bet is cross countries will go the way of the dodo after the rona is over. Production hasn't ceased without 'em. Who gives a shit what kind of widget we turn out as long as we make more than we did last year, right?
Can confirm. I just finished SNFO primary instruments. The furthest I went for an out and in stopover was from KNPA to Tallahassee (and that was a big deal in the student ready room!). I dropped in at KNBG for some GCA approaches as KNPA's PAR is down for maintenance until the end of the month, and the furthest west I stopped over at was Stennis as we have to stay at the FBO for food between hops (can't beat the $1 meals for aircrew at KHSA). Furthest north was a drop in at KOZR for more GCAs and an ILS. Instrument hops kind of suck in the time of covid-19, but it's what you make of it, I suppose.
 

SynixMan

HKG Based Artificial Excrement Pilot
pilot
Contributor
My bet is cross countries will go the way of the dodo after the rona is over. Production hasn't ceased without 'em. Who gives a shit what kind of widget we turn out as long as we make more than we did last year, right?

Eh, the TAD budget is a drop in the bucket compared to other costs like MX, parts, and fuel. When we get past the virus, I'd expect to see it come back.
 

scoolbubba

Brett327 gargles ballsacks
pilot
Contributor
Eh, the TAD budget is a drop in the bucket compared to other costs like MX, parts, and fuel. When we get past the virus, I'd expect to see it come back.

It's not the TAD budget. It's the impact to production when planes get stuck on the road. We still can't get weekend or closed field ops at NASWF, but at least we'll harp on squashing inefficiencies that rarely come up.
 

Dontcallmegump

Well-Known Member
pilot
It's not the TAD budget. It's the impact to production when planes get stuck on the road. We still can't get weekend or closed field ops at NASWF, but at least we'll harp on squashing inefficiencies that rarely come up.

Still???

Solo saturday was almost a thing one time (you probably already knew that), early this year when there was about 25 studs getting held up between the 3 VTs. For nearly 6 weeks the wx forecast would be dismal M-F and glorious every weekend, and actually pan out that way.

Then the wing said "no way losers, re-checks build character".

Best-worst times ever living in the ready room for a month waiting for 5000 and 5...
 

SynixMan

HKG Based Artificial Excrement Pilot
pilot
Contributor
It's not the TAD budget. It's the impact to production when planes get stuck on the road. We still can't get weekend or closed field ops at NASWF, but at least we'll harp on squashing inefficiencies that rarely come up.

Eh if 1-2 a weekend across the wing is breaking your production, that says more about overall aircraft availability than anything else. I'm still amazed at how in 2018 we were so hand to mouth over stupid parts on planes that were less than 10 years old.
 

Jim123

DD-214 in hand and I'm gonna party like it's 1998
pilot
Best-worst times ever living in the ready room for a month waiting for 5000 and 5...
You could have been chair flying by walking around the big map that's painted in the parking lot. The one between the fence and the old VT-6 lineshack, it's got the working areas, airports/OLFs, roads, random checkpoints like ponds and stuff. (The map which is inexplicably oriented 90° off from north. Oriented like if you and your buds were doing land nav out in the field and your friend laid out the map with the top of the chart to the... east.)

Eh if 1-2 a weekend across the wing is breaking your production, that says more about overall aircraft availability than anything else. I'm still amazed at how in 2018 we were so hand to mouth over stupid parts on planes that were less than 10 years old.
When Hawker-Beechcraft went bankrupt c2012~2013 (in hindsight, acquiring Hawker business jets during an economic downturn was unwise, and it dragged down Beech's license to print money from mil contracts and the perennial King Air line), we simply ran out of hydraulic power packs for those and had to park a lot of airplanes.

As you may remember, the T-6 hydraulic level indicator, down low just behind the wing root, is a real Rube Goldberg affair. (I'm convinced the power pack was designed by a whiz kid who's high school guidance counselor told him or her, "You get good marks in math, you should be an engineer!" but the kid never changed the oil on a car, took apart a lawnmower, changed a flat tire on a bicycle, probably didn't even play with Lego.) There is a green plastic strip that is like a weedwhacker string, it's inside a metal tube and you can see where the string ends inside a little window cut into the tube. Where the string ends indirectly tells you if it's full or empty or in between. The hydraulic reservoir has a steel rod that sticks out (we're not allowed to call it a donkey dick anymore); the reservoir is sealed so that rod sticks out a lot or a little bit if the reservoir is full or empty. But the way the whiz kids designed that part of the airplane, the steel rod disappears into the innards of the airplane, hard to see... unless you extend the flaps, lay on the ground, and shimmy under the airplane through the gap where the flaps retract.

And thus our own whiz kids at Navair solved the hydraulic power pack shortage- by providing calibrated measuring sticks (aka ruler by a different name) to measure the donkey dick steel rod sticking out of the hydraulic reservoir and an officially approved procedure for doing it. There was even talk of having to recalibrate the measuring sticks once a year, or whatever the instruction says for calibrating tools. I think somebody in a flight suit told them no thanks, it's not a torque wrench, it's a piece of metal.

Makes you wonder if the fine folks in Wichita had just built that power pack facing the other way in the first place. They could have built it any way they pleased- the pump is fifteen feet away on the engine.

It boggles my mind how we won WWII and went to the moon.

I hear the F-35 program is the opposite, runs like a well oiled machine and zero problems.
 
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