I don’t understand why so many military/pseudo-military shows follow pilots. I’ve known some good ones, but then I’ve known some stuck-up, elitist zipper-suited-sun-gods who deserved nothing more than a healthy eye roll.
How many times can the entertainment industry film/write a dogfight scene, anyway? And, despite the maxim that there are two kinds of aircraft: fighters and targets, most pilots fly targets. For one thing, you throw up less. For another, it’s easier to transition into that cush job with United.
But for real action, danger, and suspense, nothing beats maintenance. (Well, infantry probably does, but I mean in the Air Force. Well, yeah, there’s Special Ops, but work with me here!) You want terror? Try being an untrained 2Lt in charge of a 140-man flight with a major inspection on the horizon. Pilots don’t even supervise anybody until they’ve been in six years. (Unless they’re fighter jocks in which case it’s more like twelve.) Have a global emergency? All pilots have to do is show up sober. Maintainers have to come in eight hours earlier to get a 12-plane squadron of tankers up and running. And they do it. In -20 wind chill. Even if they’re not completely sober.
It seems that all space operas use the naval model for their space forces. I can see that for big, star-faring ships, but I’ll bet planet defenses will be closer to Air Force. To that end, I offer the following.
Maintenance organizations and chains of command are an ever-evolving lifeform. Still, there are three basic levels of maintenance: flightline, backshop, and depot (deh’-poe). The three promise increasingly intrusive maintenance with decreasing levels of stress.
Flightline is the most basic maintenance with the most intense environment. It’s pre- and post-flight inspections and minor stuff to get the plane in the air. They have the most pressure from operations (OPs) and get deployed the most often. It is 24-hours, usually only 5-days a week, depending on schedule (if a Reserve or Guard unit needs refueling, it’ll probably happen on the weekend). Non-deployed weekends that don’t involve an inspection or exercise and don’t fall within hunting season are spent playing softball with the local bar league.
Backshop is on base, but much more relaxed. Inspections are more thorough and take from one to several weeks, instead of a couple of hours. Engines are taken off and checked out. Fights with the flightline are common, as the flightline seems to think getting their plane back is more important than burger burns. TDYs are usually flightline in-fills. Weekends are spent hunting for prairie dogs. Unless it’s hunting season, in which case it’s spent killing Bambi with the supply guy who got you those expedition-weight poly-propes and the squadron commander, a major with a firearm merchant license.
Depot is off-site and can take a year. Maintainers are generally civilian contractors. The plane is stripped to its skivvies and rebuilt from the ground up. I don’t know how they spend their weekends. Maybe bass fishing.
As I mentioned, flightline maintenance is the most intense. It seems to constantly fluctuate between falling under logistics and operations, depending on if the current administration is generous enough to believe maintainers deserve a couple more squadron commander slots to shoot for or if they would rather have less infighting and more control. When I was in, and this was tankers, mind you, barely out of SAC’s warm embrace, flightline maintenance was under the LG (logistics group commander) but moved to ops about a year later. That put the 12-13 airframes and their maintainers in the same squadron as the flyers. The commander was a flyer (of course; because flyers must be led by flyers). The rundown was something like this:
- 1 Squadron commander: old Maj or LtCol; flyer
- 3-4 admin: including exec (Capt or Maj; flyer), intel (Lt; non-rated ops—she wore the bag but didn’t fly), 1 or 2 admin (Lt; admin/personnel), First Sergeant, weather, plus several enlisted
- ~4 Ops Flight Commanders: Maj or LtCol; flyers
- Half a billion lieutenant and captain pilots and navs*
- 1 Maintenance Superintendent: ran from grizzled LtCol frustrated with system to fresh-faced captain with under-manned supervision and no respect from squadron supervision
- 1-3 Maintenance Officers: 2Lt-Maj depending on how manned the squadron was; never as trained as they should be
- 1 Chief: He who must be obeyed
- 1-3 SMSgts who spent down times redesigning squadron patch to look like a mug of beer with a head of foam, a softball bat, a ball, and two more cans of beer
- Half a billion Amn-MSgts who do all the work
At our most fully manned, we had that grizzled LtCol maintenance supervisor, a prior-enlisted captain, and two LTs—one of whom had actually been to tech school. At our worst, we had a Capt maintenance supervisor and me, a 2Lt who hadn’t been to school yet. That was not fun.
But this is subject to change. A friend, Bud, a major at the time, was maintenance on F-15s. His boss, the maintenance superintendent, was a pilot. Bud actually liked and respected his boss, but I can see how that would lead to animosity (and story tension), not least because the more supervisory positions you fill with pilots, the less opportunity LG (logistics) officers have of getting promoted. Then again, the more familiarity flyers have with maintenance, the better.
Our flightline maintenance unit ran vaguely thusly:
Supervision
- Maintenance Superintendent: major who knew he could go no further because the Ops Group Commander has only so many DPs, and they’re all going to flyers
- Chief: chief
- 1 or 2 SMSgts to talk about hunting and softball
- 2-3 airmen to harass flights to get performance reports in on time
Sortie Generation Flight (~150 people)
- 12-13 airframes**: each with assigned team of crew chiefs who complete inspections, etc.
- Specialists: engines, hydraulics, electrical, avionics
- Production Supervisors (“Pro-Supers”): team of MSgts, usually one per shift, who coordinate all maintenance
- Expeditors: team of TSgts responsible for ferrying maintainers from the Ready Room to the flightline, making sure the work gets done, and signing off on more complicated jobs
- Admin: various ranks, responsible for scheduling, performance reports, training, awards packages
Sortie Support Flight (~20 people)
- Benchstock: consumable supplies such as sealant, screws, etc., all of which must be accounted for at shift-end
- Consolidated Tool Kit (“CTK”): tool check-out area, all of which must be accounted for at shift-end
- Scheduling: figures out which planes will fly which missions (Planes are designed to be flown. If they stay on the ground, they break.)
- Technical Orders (“TOs”): updates and maintains all TOs—big binders of How Things Are Done; every single maintainer must have the TO open to the correct page when completing all maintenance tasks and pretend to read the steps (or something like this might happen)
- Training: makes sure everyone’s up to date on training requirements both technical and military
- Debrief: talks to pilots when they land and determines how the pilot broke the planes this time
- And then there’s the other section—Brooksy was in it, he who dropped a MagLight and broke his toe, causing supervision to enforce the ban on mukluks with no steel toes. (Later he got in trouble for jokingly chasing around his kids with a hammer in his backyard—in full view of the back gate guards.) Anyway, they did stuff like made sure the jacks and de-icing ropes were where they needed to be.
Terminology
- Burn One Area (or “BOA”), AKA “Porch”: where the senior NCOs go to smoke, talk about hunting, and solve all the world’s problems
- R-squared: Remove and replace; many electrical components are not fixed at the unit level, but just swapped out for a new one
- Zipper-Suited Sun God: pilot
- Knuckle-dragger: maintainer
- Bag: flightsuit
- Cann (aka: Cannibalize): to take parts off of one plane to get another ready to fly
- Hangar Queen: the plane that’s so broke it’s being cann’d off of for the other planes
- Crud: a somewhat violent game that drunk flyers play with a pool table with toilet paper rolls blocking the center pockets and two balls, typically the cue ball and the 8 ball
- TDY: temporary duty; like a business trip with worse lodging
- Poly-propes: polypropylene underwear; essential for refueling in January and/or sitting in a deer blind for hours
- Burger burn: squadron booster club fund raiser wherein the MSgts grill burgers on the huge grill they had made in the backshop’s machine shop
- Flight: a functional unit larger than an element or shop, smaller than a squadron; operational flight commanders may have non-judicial punishment authority; maintenance flight supervisors don’t (would you want a lieutenant to have authority to give you an Article 15?)
- Time Compliant Technical Order (TCTO): a modification to or inspection of the aircraft that must be completed within a certain amount of time
- Definitely Promote (DP): rating on an officer’s performance report that almost assures you will get promoted; incredibly rare for maintainers in an ops squadron
There are plenty of opportunities for story tension in a maintenance unit. The two CTK NCOs could fight over whether to play country music or rap. The maintenance superintendent could marry a master sergeant, weeks after the sergeant moved from his squadron to the command center. Or the junior maintenance officer’s friend, the admin officer, could marry an airman from another unit while their commander is deployed, and the commander could rely on guilt-by-association and make the junior maintenance officer’s (who was at tech school at the time) life miserable.
That’s just interpersonal. Maintenance officers and supervisors have to juggle about forty things every day. Performance reports, awards packages, deployments, training TDYs. Boneheads from above who demand more than is physically possible. Boneheads from below who steal computers or forget to drink water (for the third day that week) and get sent to the hospital for heat stroke. Squadron commanders who consistently land their planes hard, causing more work for the crew chief and potential damage to their beloved tail number. Deicers that don’t start in the cold. Deicers that leak hydraulic fluid all over because they were stored in the hangar bays to keep them out of the cold. Group commanders who don’t want to pay for block heaters for the deicers. Supply troops who don’t want to open their carefully packed deployment kits to get that one part you need RIGHT NOW. Add to that stuff like war, criminal investigations, and a hangar bay spontaneously filled with fire suppression foam and you can have yourself a nice little story.
* This was back in the day when there were navs. As I was leaving, they were adding a position called “Third Pilot” which was a very junior pilot who worked a new navigational computer.
** This is a KC-135R tanker squadron. Fighter squadrons have a bazillion planes.
Next week: The Backshop, or How to be in the Air Force and Still Make Money
Kersley Fitzgerald misses some things about the Air Force like the pay check, the BDUs, and the people. Well, some of the people. But her unit moved to Florida, and she chose to follow Maj Tom. Which she has never regretted.
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