That week in June when everything went sideways on a 737

Back in 2019 I had a stretch where three planes in five days threw me curveballs. First it was a cracked fan blade on a CFM56 that took 14 hours to swap out because one bolt stripped. Then a hydraulic line on a 737 started leaking right after I buttoned it up, had to redo the whole section under the floor panels. What made it stand out was the heat wave hitting 102 degrees that week, sweating through my coveralls while chasing a fault in the overhead panel. Anyone else have a run of bad luck like that where it felt like the planes were fighting back?

3 comments

3 Comments

johnson.daniel1mo ago

Man, that cracked fan blade story gave me flashbacks. I had a similar run in 2018 where I was stuck troubleshooting an APU issue on a CRJ that just would not cooperate, you know the kind where you replace a part and the same fault code comes back. What finally worked for me was stepping back for ten minutes, getting a Gatorade from the break room, and then actually reading the schematic instead of just relying on my gut feeling. I traced it to a pinched wire in the harness that was grounding out intermittently, something I never would have caught if I kept jamming parts at it. The heat wave sounds brutal too, I had a 98 degree day doing a fuel valve replacement and felt like I was working in a sauna.

walker.max1mo ago

Three years ago I had the exact same thing on a 737 pack valve. Swapped the valve twice, same fault code popped up. Finally sat down with the wiring diagram and found a chafed wire behind a clamp that only grounded out when the plane hit a certain vibration. @johnson.daniel you're dead right about walking away for a bit. That Gatorade idea is solid too - I started keeping a cooler in the truck after a 102 degree afternoon replacing a thrust reverser actuator. Had to crawl out every twenty minutes just to dump water over my head. The pinched wire thing is a classic too. Check your ground straps and bonding jumpers while you're at it. I've seen those cause more phantom faults than bad parts ever did.

park.abby1mo ago

idk man, some weeks feel cursed. That heat wave on top of everything sounds brutal.