It has been a few months since I have done a work update. So I thought I better give one, work has continued to be steady, flat out at times and ongoing. We had a C check on a Twin Otter (MFB) for five or six weeks. It is always a challenge to work through that while having other aircraft coming in. But in the past months all I have really worked on is Twin Otter’s, the Caravan which doesn’t come in much and occasionally GA8’s. I rarely work on any C206’s.
Back in April or May I was asked if I would take on the role of hangar safety officer or safety rep. Which I agreed to, and I have been spending 1-2 hours each Monday morning working on various projects or reports (will hopefully start running some training this week) and whenever I get a chance. Interesting thing (I guess no surprise) for people who know how far people have gone with the Aussie OH&S policy is that PNG does not have a policy, but we do have one in our MAF operating procedures. Two weeks ago we had our first fire drill since I have been here. Later in the week a group of us met together with one of the PNG safety officer’s to discuss how it went and work on procedures and other issues we have here in this area.
1. Tower of Death in background
Three weeks ago was a quieter week than normal, which is good. We normally get a quiet week every few months (not much scheduled maintenance). It is good because this allows us who aren’t working on aircraft to do other work around the hangar. There is always plenty of other stuff to do, hangar maintenance, component rebuilds, engineering projects etc. Stuff that we need to do and catch up on and don’t have much time for when we are all on aircraft. For me it was a good week, just being able to get into different safety projects. One of them was playing with new scaffolding we had recently received thanks to money donated by MAF US for new equipment and tooling for the engineering department back in 2008. To come up with different setups that are safe for our needs for different aircraft and come up with procedures for doing so.
All the places I have worked commercial or military we have had adequate equipment in stands, docking, forklifts, harness systems, scissor lifts that sort of thing (but again they are bigger aircraft, some much bigger). Here we normally get by with ladders or stands that are homemade and quite old. It can be quite awkward removing parts off the Twin Otter this way. Anyway the new scaffolding we are able to make a tail stand and two wing stands out of it all. Another Engineer and I played around with it seeing what combinations we could make with it and see if it could meet all our needs. The tail stand worked out really well, only using three out of five levels we could use to make it (so it can go quite high). The setup we came up with was able to meet all the needs and work to be done on the tail of a Twin Otter. Plus all the guys who would be using it were very happy with it. And is a lot safer than the old stand. Which I nicknamed the tower of death, because you don’t know if it will hold you next time you use it (never mind that all you have up there is thin metal flooring and a rope around you). So there is a few projects to do here, but we are moving forward and will hopefully make working a lot easier, let alone safer.
Here is a slideshow of some photos taken to make instructions for the assembly of the tail stand. Funny thing is these were taken while disassembling it all, once we were happy with the setup. The only photo that we did not end up taking was one of Kalex and I underneath a pile of the scaffolding as a warning if you were to assemble or dissemble it incorrectly.
