By LT Sam Laurvick
E
very pilot, maintainer, and deck handler hopes for successful and safe deployment operations with no glitches or delays. The reality is that deployed operations include triumphs and dilemmas. When a problem surfaces, decisiveness and sound judgment minimize the risk of injury to personnel and damage to equipment. The actions taken must be sound and precautionary, especially when they are nonstandard. We were almost seven months into deployment on a Flight IIA DDG with two MH-60Rs operating in 6th Fleet. The preparation for this particular day’s flight schedule was nothing unusual or unfamiliar. The daily and turnaround inspections were completed, the helicopter traversed out of the port hangar, the tail pylon and rotor blades were spread, and the aircraft was moved into the position on deck for flight. A small hiccup occurred during the blade spread sequence. The blades were moving upon the spread command, but there was no spread indication in the cockpit. On the right rear rotor blade (more commonly known as the red blade), the blade lock-pin puller assembly was not driving in the main rotor-blade lock pins. As a result, the blade-fold test set, aka the cheater box, was used to drive the lock pins against the micro switches to ensure a fully spread rotor head. To everyone’s surprise this did not produce the desired result.
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The next option was to manually drive the blade lock pins by performing old fashioned wrench turning — victory. A spread light came on in the cockpit. Our maintainers walked away with a triumph over the machine, but learned they would later have to fix a faulty blade lockpin puller. The aircraft was set to commence the scheduled flight operations, and troubleshooting would be conducted at night after the last flight had shutdown. The orchestra of recovering, hot-pumping, hot-seating, and launching the rest of the day went without errors. Once the day was over and
Mech
