UPDATE: Results in extended entry

Want to know what it's about? See the Shamming/Sharing intro post.

Our third offering. Is this anecdote the truth or am I pulling your leg?

My dad and I have a lot in common. I got my work ethic from him. I got my anal retentive personality from him. Even my job shadows what he did for a career.

Until a few years ago my dad did quality assurance for the Air Force. When he started it was called Quality Control then it was Quality Assurance and for the last upteen years it was called Non Destructive Investigation. Whatever they called it, it's what we civilians now call QA.

He did stress tests and other analysis on live birds. That's aircraft in service, y'all, not actual feathered beasties. He had much cooler toys than I do. I have a PC and some nifty software. He had irradiation machines, X-Rays big enough to scan the wings of a C-130 Hercules transport and more tools than you can shake a fist at. He was forcibly retired (high year tenure) a few years ago.

He's not sitting idle though. He kept his side job for the FBI. He isn't a spy or anything. He does the upkeep and maintenance on the surveillance aircraft used by the Buffalo FBI. And I used to help him.

That's right, I worked on airplanes for the FBI. Well, to be precise I worked on FBI airplanes for their contractor and that contractor just happened to be my dad. For many years I would go up to the Niagara Falls Air Force Base with him on the weekends and do odd jobs while he did the important stuff. I washed square acres worth of plane wings over the years (seemed like it anyway). Towards the end of my time in Buffalo I was doing some cool stuff too. Engine checks, firing magnetos, instrument checks, testing the smoke screen generator...lots of cool stuff. Once I even got to fly one of the planes.

It was after the completion of a 100 hours maintenance cycle and the agent (not sure if I'm supposed to say his name so I'll just call him Agent Bob) was there to go over a couple of things that he thought were quirky. We all ended up taking a short flight so he could show Dad what the quirks were. When we were up to altitude Agent Bob gave me the controls. That was very cool. And scary. I don't have a whole lot of specifics in my memory because the majority of my one and only piloting experience was spent staring at the attitude indicator and repeating a mantra of "Holyshitholyshitholyshit" to myself. It might have been better if I'd spent some time with Flight Simulator before then but it was still pretty cool.

Current Shamming/Sharing roster:

1 Correct
jim
Mike the Marine
MojoMark
Sue
Tiffani

0 Correct
Everybody else And the winner(s) is(are):

Mike the Marine
Simon
Rob
Jim
Tiffani
Sue

Yup, that was a true story. Pretty cool, eh? 6 out of 9 got it right, same ratio as the last one (4 of 6 last time).

A new shamming/sharing will go up (hopefully) today. If I can stop tossing up lung cookies long enough to write it.

Posted by: Jim at 07:45 AM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
Post contains 559 words, total size 3 kb.