Maintenance practises are back!

 Welcome back my aeronautics enthusiasts,

In today’s blog we will talk again about some practises we’ve been doing at Globalia and a little bit about my life. After two weeks of doing classes, we finally had the opportunity to come back to the workshop. Until now, everything has been only classes and listening to the teachers but from now on, every weekend we have workshop activities until the course finishes.

This weekend we have done many interesting things at the workshop. All of them have been related with the Cessna 441. This is due because it is the newest aircraft, and it is important to take care of him and restore it as soon as possible. The other two aircraft are very old, and corrosion are killing them slowly. That’s what we want to prevent to happen on the Cessna.

One of the first practises that we did, was doing the weight and balance of the aircraft already explained on the last blog. For doing this we used some weighing machines and the help of all the students for rolling the aircraft into it. With the help of a ramp, we managed to tow the aircraft on the machines. After weighing the main landing gear (left and right) and the nose landing gear, with the help of a formula we located the Centre of Gravity of the aircraft.

As the engines aren’t mounted, the aircraft is 800kg lighter, so the CG was beyond the limits and very close to the Main Landing Gear. This means that if we put some weight on the aft position, the plane could easily do a wheely and that’s why we have a holder support on the tail. Is it important to always take some precautions, to avoid accidents!

The second practise we have done at the workshop was doing the programmed inspections of the Cessna when the plane has accumulated 200 hours of flying. These inspections are explained on the Maintenance Manual on the ATA Chapter nº5. Most of them are just visual inspections and just look that everything was fine. We divided these task in 4 different teams, and my new team is composed by Miguel Munar, Miguel Lliteras and Daniel Miró. One of the tasks we had to do was inspecting the push pull rods of the vertical stabilizer and check that there were in good condition. We had to check for any corrosion, loosen screws or any missing or broken rivets. For doing this task we had to disassemble the rear Stinger, which is only a piece of plastic for covering the actuators. 

We had some difficulties because there were some corroded screws, and we couldn’t remove them. We needed to use a pneumatic crusher, but we only removed one. At the end, the other two remaining we had to drill and extract them. You can see my face of frustation while removing them!

Our big surprise was that when we removed the Stinger, there was a bird nest. Everything was plenty of small branches and some pens of the bird. Fortunately, there wasn’t any animals or eggs, so we clean up everything because it was very dirty and finally, we mounted it back. Here you can see the nest after removing the dusty panel and later a photo of everything cleaned and mounted back.

From the moment, this is everything that we done so far in Globalia this weekend. Notwithstanding, after classes I’ve been very busy this weekend. This Wednesday was my girlfriend’s birthday, so I had to do a birthday cake and I did a tasty 3 chocolate cake. It is one of my favourite cakes and it is also very easy to do it!

Another thing I did on this weekend was visiting the “Les Fires d’Inca”. Every weekend the topic of the "fira" changes. This weekend the topic were the flowers but also “Les Fires d’Emergéncia”. All the emergency squads where there, from la Guardia Civil, Firefighters and even the Militaries. There were showing all the vehicles they use and there were even the helicopters they used. I really enjoyed going there and see everything, at least for my is very interesting seeing how they work and see all their gadgets. I also saw the equipment that the anti-explosives uses when they need to defuse a bomb, from the robot to the armored suit.

Next weekend, the topic of the party will be the cars and as my girlfriend’s dad as many classic cars, some Seat 600, I will drive one around the city and we will expose them to the public. I’m very excited for next weekend because it is one of my favourite “fires”. In a few weeks, the last “fira” is called Dijous Bo and it is one of the most important celebrations in Mallorca.

Thank you for reading my blog as every weekend and I hope you also had a fantastic weekend like mine! See you on next blog!!