221114 Aircraft Repairs

Mid-Sixties to Mid-Seventies Aircraft Equipment Repair

I was thinking back this morning about my navy days. I worked on many types of electronic equipment. In two cruises on the Kitty Hawk I worked on planes up on the flight deck and the last cruise on the Enterprise I worked in the higher level maintenance shop. Many radios, navigation systems, computers and radar required a lot of maintenance. I had problems until I developed my process and reduced my aircraft repair time dramatically. There were other systems on planes that rarely ever failed. All planes had radio direction finders, but in all three cruises I never had to replace or repair one. The radio direction finder would pick up civilian stations from a long distance and when I wasn’t busy repairing, I would sit in the plane’s cockpit to listen to songs on the direction finder. My favorite station ( and everyone else's favorite radio show was Wolfman Jack out of LA.) Off The coast of Vietnam, I would listen to armed forces radio shows. I could also listen to Chinese radio stations, but the pling plong music drove me crazy. Intercoms in the planes rarely failed. All five crew members in the E-2A aircraft had connections over the intercom. I think I had to change one com box because of a faulty switch in the three cruises and all the time ashore. Once I had an aircraft identification transponder come into the shop for a repair. It was an old one and it had a white encapsulation plastic over all of the components. The idea was the encapsulation kept the components from shorting out when the planes came down from high altitude cold air and met with very warm air on land or at sea. The cold air meeting warm air created moisture that could short out components. I located the problem down to a single component, replaced it in the identification transponder. I didn’t have access to the white plastic insulation, so I used some glue and it worked. I worked on some old WW-2 radios from a squadron aboard the Kitty Hawk during one cruise. Those radios had vacuum tubes which made them huge and heavy to haul around. That equipment was so old there were few replacement parts at the manufacturer any more. One more piece of electronic equipment that never broke down were the altimeters (a small radar device on the bottom of the plane that measured the distance between the plane and the landing surface). There were only two times when a pilot wrote up a repair on the altimeters. Pilots kept a keen eye on the altimeter when landing on the ship. Too high on landing made it impossible to stop using an arresting cable, too low meant they would crash into the end of the flight deck and in a duel between a flight deck and an aircraft, the deck always won and the crew had an early demise. The only test equipment for the altimeter was a box about the size of a military ammunition box that was filled with a long delay cable. The box was hooked up to the altimeter and then the tech would climb into the cockpit and look at the reading. As long as the reading was 160 feet, the altimeter was good. The thing I wondered about was why it was not set for 60 feet which was about the height of the flight deck on a Kitty Hawk class carrier. That would have been the right place to check calibration so the pilot would know he could clear the flight deck when coming in for a landing. One other thing that I remember was the long-wire antenna. It was at the aft end of the plane on the underside. The idea was if the plane was outside the range of the stub style UHF antennas the crew could let the long-wire antenna roll out to improve transmission and reception. The long-wire had what was called a drogue on the end of it. The drogue was like a five pound circular weight that when the brake on the wire was released it would drag the long-wire out from the plane. The antenna was rarely used, so rarely that when one crew rolled it out to check it during a flight, the crewman forgot to reel it back in. There was a safety measure built into the system so if the long wire was extended and the pilot dropped the tail hook to make his landing on the ship, the system would automatically cut the cable. As some of us know, when a metal cable is under strain and the cable is cut, there is a swift back snap on the secured end. The antenna cable snapped and wrapped around the reel and several other things in the compartment below where the radar crew sat. Replacing the long wire antenna was a major chore because all of the floor boards had to be removed (unscrewed) and then the tech would have to lie on his belly to reach down and remove the remaining cable inside the plane and then replace the new long-wire cable. I only had to do that once and once was enough. I did enjoy working on electronic equipment during my time in the navy and remember it fondly.