DON'T EVER "TRUST" ANYBODY - EVER!! (22)

Particularly when your life depends on it. With that intriguing statement, you need some background. First, in addition to my duties as Maintenance Officer and as a Flight Instructor, I occasionally got tapped for the job of Officer In Charge of carrier qualifications. That meant that I would be sent to an aircraft carrier operating off the coast of California to be the "boss" of a group of instructor and maintenance men whose mission was to qualify pilots in carrier operations. To "Qualify" each pilot must make six day landings and two night landings.

Second, my Assistant Maintenance Officer was a middle-aged non-aviator named John Osborne. John was a stable, experienced, and wise fellow. I depended on him a lot. Actually, he had the ability to almost know what I was thinking and became a close friend.

Third, a modern ejection seat, the device that blasts a pilot out of his airplane and into his parachute, has some seven explosive cartridges in it. Therefore, whenever the plane is on the ground, safety pins are inserted into the firing mechanisms of the three cartridges that are accessible. The pins are connected together with a small steel cable and are flagged with heavy red ribbon. The ribbon is, of course, to make for easy seeing. But, back to the carrier. There were times aboard the carrier when we were not operating and time hung heavy on our hands. so surprise, surprise! The mail plane brought a letter for me from John. He was worried that I'd get bored, so he sent me the following little story.           click image for source It seems that a pilot was going through his routine pre-flight inspection of his ejection seat when he noticed a bit of red material down behind the seat in the "works."

He decided that it might be important enough to not fly that airplane and reported it. Well, the preliminary investigation discovered that it was an extra set of seat pins, and that several of the firing mechanisms were pinned -- read that as "disabled." In other words, the seat could not possibly have worked. It would have blasted out of the airplane, but the pilot would have remained strapped to the seat - all the way to the ground.

Intensive follow-up revealed that the seat had been looked at by a total of 26 people, all of whom should have found the pins. The 26 included pilots, plane captains and seat mechanics, all of whom SHOULD HAVE recognized this life-threatening problem. How did the pins get there? We never found out.