Broke Broke

One of the nice things about flying for an airline is that our maintenance is really pretty good. Our planes are in good shape. More often than not, there is nothing broken or MEL'd on the aircraft. That was rarely the case at my former company. Up until the following story occurred, only one of my flights had been cancelled due to a mechanical problem. That's a pretty good track record considering the hundreds of flights and over 500 hours I've flown since coming on line. The following day was going to be an exception.

It was day 4 of a 4 day trip and the crew was looking forward to finishing up the trip. We were scheduled to do 5 legs and around 7 hours of flying that day. Due to circumstances beyond our control, we flew ZERO. It all started out in PIT. We got to the airport, trudged through security and made our way to the gate. The gate agent was waiting for us and had our paperwork ready for our inspection. The weather was looking good and we were not anticipating any delays all day long. She checked our ID's and sent us down the jetway. We all did our usual ballet of storing our bags, powering up the airplane and making our respective nests. After making of said nest, I headed out to do the walk around. It was a first flight of the day, so I had to open every panel and do a couple of extra steps that don't get done on a normal walk around. As I was rounding the right wing tip, and looking down the length of the wing, something caught my eye. Something was amiss. It took a second or two to actually compute what I was seeing. Part of the aircraft was missing. On the underside of the wing there are several flap actuators that move the flaps. They are all covered by plastic fairings that improve aerodynamics. These fairings are in two parts. The front part attaches to the underside of the wing while the rear part attaches to the flap itself. On the innermost actuator, the one closest to the main landing gear, the entire back half of the flap actuator fairing was missing! The bells and whistles in my head immediately started going off. I remembered from training that we were allowed to fly the aircraft with certain parts missing, but I didn't think we could fly the plane with such a large part missing. I believed our CDL (configuration deviation list) only accounted for little things like static wick's and the brushes attached to the main landing gear doors, not entire fairings.

So after inspecting the area thoroughly, I continued on with the rest of the walk around. Everything else was normal so I made my way to the cockpit to first inspect the books to see if it had already been written up and then inform the Capt. of my findings. An inspection of the logbooks and write up sheet showed nothing about a missing flap fairing, so informing the Capt. was next on the list. He was puzzled by the news, so we both headed out to the right wing to inspect the area again. Upon the second inspection we noticed that the screws were missing on the inboard side, yet still attached to the outboard brackets. This led us to the conclusion that it must have fallen off in flight on the previous flight. So we headed back up the jetbridge to call the company. They sent a mechanic out, he took some pictures, threw up his hands and said there's nothing he can do. The flight was to be indefinitely delayed due to maintenance. Needless to say, we were not a happy crew, the gate agent was not at all pleased and the passengers were even more upset. If there was one bright spot in this gloomy morning, it was that the company has a maintenance base not too far from PIT, they had a spare fairing and we could be out of there in a few hours.

So a few hours passed and the mechanics from the repair station finally showed up. They had the part and were planning on taking a half hour for the repair. What they didn't plan on was the brackets being bent out of shape. When the fairing ripped off, the screws were still attached on the outboard side of the fairing, the fairing bent the brackets in the process. The mechanics didn't bring new brackets, so this further delayed our day. The company finally cancelled the flight and told us we were to still ferry the plane back to base so we could complete our last out and back of the day.

A few hours after that, the plane was finally fixed. The paperwork completed, it was time to go. The jetbridge pulled away, the door closed, we were going to be on our way finally. Or so we thought. We fired up the apu, started running our first checklist and DING, we get a master caution. Stab Trim, Mach Trim. Ok...we press the buttons to re-engage....nothing. Quick call to the company, we are told to pull a few circuit breakers, wait 30 seconds then reset them. Procedure accomplished...same result. Plane is down again! This time maintenance comes out, inspects the avionics, finds the problem, but doesn't have a replacement part. For the second time that day the plane was Broke Broke.