Phases on Stun

There's been a change to our maintenance control manual. Previously we would have a minor, half-day inspection (called a 50 hour inspection), fifty hours of flying, a major four day inspection (called a hundred hour inspection), fifty more hours of flying and then repeat from the beginning. Now we still have an inspection every fifty hours, but our maintenance is now ''phase based''. All inspections take two days. On one inspection they look at the left engine, empennage and wings really thoroughly. Then on the next one it's the right engine, fuselage and landing gear. I don't have the MCM with me, so I may not have that exact. The point is that they distribute the work of the old 100 hour check across two inspections. The work of the old 50-hour is still done at every inspection. different inspections are called Events. There are four events. The AME who explained it to me said that Events #1 & #3 are the same, as are Events #2 & 4. It's not clear to me yet why they need different numbers.

We're having a company mechanic fly up to do an Event #3 while the weather is bad. Of course the "takes two days" part assumes they don't find anything serious that requires parts.

And a couple of blogs to tell you about. I was going to work them cleverly into relevant posts, but I haven't got anything appropriate scheduled, and I don't want to forget about them.

Decision Height is updated infrequently by a senior pilot at a major airline. It includes more opinion and more of the downside to being an airline pilot than Dave's FL390 (which most of my readers are familiar with).

The other is Report on Conditions, a title generic enough to be misleading, as this is a firefighting blog. I had no idea how varied the work was. As blogger Captain Schmoe describes it, he concentrates on the human side of the job, both through empathy for the people he deals with and in discussing the decisions firefighters have to make.