The Microsoft Jet

I was a little surprised when we were alerted shortly before midnight, exactly as planned, after limping a broken aircraft into Turkey with significant electrical problems. These things usually take a little longer to fix than planned, since maintenance problems sometimes require parts that aren’t readily available or the labor takes longer than expected. Perhaps the electrician had found the electrical short right away, they had the part in inventory, and they had no problems installing it. At any rate, it looked like we’d be back in Germany by morning.

Upon arrival at the command post, we learned that our mission had changed; we were now scheduled for another aeromedical evacuation flight, this time to Iraq. It made sense: our aircraft was already configured for the mission, we had a full aeromedical crew with us, and we were only a couple of hours from Iraq. We picked up our gear, out-processed through Customs, and headed out to the jet.

After arriving at the aircraft, we checked in with maintenance to see what they did while we were in crew rest. To our surprise, an electrician had never even looked at the jet. The maintainers we debriefed after we landed didn’t even pass along any of our concerns to the crew that was preparing to launch us. In between, maintenance simply rebooted the aircraft, just like a troublesome computer. The C-17 truly is the Microsoft Jet.

We had some concerns, but maintenance insisted that the problem could not be duplicated. We still suspected a short in either the comfort pallet or its controlling electrical bus, but maintenance felt we were good to go. However, during the loadmaster’s pre-flight, he was required to turn the power on for the comfort pallet…and we were amazingly plunged back into darkness. So much for the Microsoft fix.

They finally called an electrician out to the aircraft. He felt that the problem lay with the comfort pallet, not the bus, even though he did not actually look at anything. After debating back and forth among the crew about the worst case scenario – an electrical fire in flight - we felt we could proceed with the mission with the comfort pallet disconnected from the bus. If the bus was later found to be the culprit and an electrical fire began, at least we would know which bus to depower to put the fire out.

However, before we could wrap things up and takeoff, maintenance discovered yet another problem: our weather radar wasn’t working. But they did have the part in stock. So they literally popped the hood - the aircraft’s nose cone - and began repairing the radar. Since we had already out-processed through Turkish Customs, we were stuck at the jet in the interim – until we were either fixed or our duty day ended. In the event of a maintenance problem before takeoff, we are limited to four hours after our scheduled takeoff time, with an optional extension to six hours with the concurrence of the crew. Since there were wounded troops in Iraq waiting for us to arrive, we elected to wait as long as we could so we could transport them to Germany for treatment.

The sky had turned a pale shade of gray by the time we were fixed five hours after our original takeoff time. Sleep had been impossible with the number of crewmembers onboard, maintenance activity and a pitifully weak air conditioning system in the cockpit. We were tired and were only planning on a relatively short flight back to Germany, so we didn’t even have much food with us. And we couldn’t get back through Customs to get anything.

But we were finally fixed and there were a dozen or so wounded troops waiting for us in Iraq. It was finally time to go to work. It was time to fly.