Fred Robel
27 Years Experience
Au Gres, MI
Male, 49
I'm a licensed Aircraft Mechanic & Inspector with twenty five-plus years in the field. I've had a varied career so far, with time spent in the sheetmetal, mechanic, and inspection specialties. Most of my time is on heavy Boeing and McDonnell Douglas aircraft, of the passenger, cargo, and experimental type. This career isn't for everyone, but I enjoy it.
Please do NOT ask me to troubleshoot problems with your airplane, that is not what this Q&A is for.
It’s psychological, of course. There are whole studies based on that question.
Fear of heights + fear of what we don’t fully understand + not having any control + media highlighting every passenger plane crash or incident.
Not really the focus of this Q&A though.
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When you ask me " what is the most difficult aircraft to work on?" I"m taking that as: "What is the most difficult aircraft that I have ever worked on". Because that is a very subjective question.
I guess the aircraft that consistently gave a pretty high difficulty level to us, has been the DC-10's. They are overbuilt tanks in the sky; with a lot of unusual structure to them we need to work around and with.
I had a friend who said that F-4's were pretty hard to work with. He did fuel cell work on them in the Air Force.
It's all based pretty much on personal experience. Ask ten different mechanics that same question, and you may very well get ten different answers.
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I recommend that you find some local help with your issue. I do not offer technical help in this forum.
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Honestly? Most of the things we do are “almost making a critical error”. In that if we judge things wrong, it can be critical.
No. I have never been responsible for an air emergency.
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I do not, and never have, gotten buddy passes; or had employee flight benefits of any kind. If you want those kinds of things, you would have to work for a passenger airline.
Buddy passes are basically stand-by/space available tickets that an airline employee can give to family or friends. Certain taxes and fees would still need to be paid.
Using those passes, puts you at the lowest priority of stand-by. So there is zero guarantees of you actually getting on a given flight.
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I'm not sure what you mean by "What happened to prop jets and planes"? From where I sit, they are where they've always been: a more economical choice for short and medium length flights than a turbine aircraft. I certainly don't see any less of them around here.
As for the "why are large and small passenger aircraft being done away with for more medium sized planes?"
This is really outside of my wheelhouse, as well as the intention of this Q&A. I'm not an aviation industry trends expert.
I'll give you the answer I give everyone else when they ask such a question of me: Money, economics, and customer trends.
Why does any type of aircraft go "out of fashion"? It always, always, has to do with money.
If you can't fill your large aircraft up all the way with passengers, then your profit margins are down. Compound that with not being able to operate them in and out of all the airports in the world due to their size; and there's another reason. Do four engines burn more fuel than two? There's another reason.
As far as small passenger aircraft going away for medium size ones..... not as far as I can see. If it makes economic sense to fly a small passenger plane on a given route, and it makes money for the company, they'll still be using that plane.
Why does Buffalo Air still use DC-3 aircraft for passengers and cargo up in Northern Canada? Since that would be crazy, right? Old, radial engined aircraft.
They do it because it makes economic sense for them to do so. It's all a money game.
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If you are referring to the 737 Max aircraft, I think better experts than me have written extensively about the issue.
A quick synopsis, I suppose, would be that Boeing wanted to upgrade the 737 series to a certain level of performance and efficiency, which required re-engining the aircraft, among other things.
Then several “needs” of the program started colliding.
In order to make the new model more appealing to airlines, Boeing promised that no new flight training would be needed for the crews.
Then the new engine just wouldn’t fit in the same profile space as the old engine. So the pylon has to be redesigned. Which put the engine a little forward and higher than the old one. This changed the c/g of the aircraft slightly, and placed the thrust point a little different.
This made the aircraft handle a little differently. But in order to make good on their promise to the airlines, Boeing had to make the plane handle exactly like the old one. Which now required complicated systems to compensate for the design changes.
Cap that off with the FAA handing off the engineering design and test approvals to internal Boeing designers, and you have effectively no oversight of the program.
Now the planes get out into the hands of the commercial operations, and the systems don’t work exactly right, or a sensor has failure issues; and these pilots who are expecting to treat the new plane just like the old one, have problems.
Basically, the new system had to compensate for a tendency for the new plane to go “nose up” under heavy thrust, causing a stall condition. But the system often corrected too aggressively, causing the plane to lose altitude and pitch nose down.
And you know the result. Two of the flight crews were unable to override that automatic system in time to avoid a crash.
It’s sad. Especially because it was avoidable.
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