A small glimpse of day-today

Ship 2 after a hard landing. Two of us sitting under the airplane with portable blowers cooling the brakes, while tires blow.

Gawd, I was tired that day. Hung over, I think. Those portable brake blowers were lawnmower engines attached to fans, noisy as heck and vibrating to beat the band. I kept falling asleep anyway....

Hey, how do I know this is a picture of A model ship 2, and not a B model, since it's the same colors? Here's the clue: Look forward of the engine inlets at the underside of the airplane. See that large shiny almost rectangular area? That's the clue.

As I mentioned elsewhere, Ship 2 was never intended to fly, it spent the first part of it's life on the shaker (at Boeing, I think) going through structrual testing. They bent it, they shook it, they stressed it, basically putting it through a simulated 2.5 airframe lifetimes to see waht would break. Good to be able to redesign portions, good to build spares lists.

But, then they decided to fly it (a billion dollars in parts is probably a good reason to see if it'll fly). And she flew very well. But those stress tests did have ramifications, the most prevelant one was fuel leaks. Damn, was this a leaky airplane.

That patch that is shiny is the most leaky, too. Leak leak leak, hard to isolated, then strip and fix. So 'round '83 the structures and fuel guys decided Heck, lets just take all the paint off and they did. Bare aluminum on each side in that area, leaks and small cracks were very easy to spot then.

Leaves a clear picture in my mind, though. Tony Colman, our best sheet metal guy, every early morning (3 AM) before a Ship Two flight, standing out in the dark and cold looking up at those panels just waiting for a crack to start....