My Own Change Management

This morning I woke up a civilian for the first time since the summer of 2005. What has changed?

The TL;DR version is a lot, but I’m still the same person. If you want the longer version, read on.

Disclaimer: what follows happened several years ago and has probably morphed over the times I have recalled this over time. It is meant for entertainment purposes, but I endeavoured to make it as accurate as possible to the best of my recollection.

Around this time of year, back in 2011, I was asleep on a narrow, squeaky bed made of 1-inch steel angle iron in my accommodation at Camp Bastion, Afghanistan. I got woken up by a Corporal from the operations center telling me that there was a call for me and that I needed to take it. I looked at my watch. It was 0200, so I put on my military-issue sandals and fumbled my way across camp in my pyjamas while consciously trying to wake myself up and process what the call could be about.

I was a young Naval Officer. My job title at the time was “Repair Officer” and I worked in a unit called 1710 Naval Air Squadron, formerly called the Mobile Aircraft Support Unit, or MASU. Due to the more descriptive nature of the latter title, and in spite of Navy Command direction that our unit be referred to as 1710 NAS, we were MASU. Everyone in rotary-wing aviation in the UK military (and even some in the US Marine Corps) knew us as that. My job, like those of dozens of repair officers who served in Afghanistan before me, and those who would do the same after, was to fix broken helicopters. However, there was a bit more to it than that. Every squadron in Afghanistan had its own engineers; indeed, I was one of them two tours prior when I was deployed to Afghanistan for the first time in 2010, so why did anyone need me? I was there, along with a team of 4 senior non-commissioned officers, to fix helicopters when they were so badly damaged, the squadrons couldn’t fix them themselves. Usually this meant one of three things had happened to an aircraft: it had crashed (generously referred to as a “heavy landing” by the pilot in command who had to fill in the incident report), it had gotten shot (SAFIREd, or Small Arms Fire had hit it), or something big and important had cracked (normally this would be a main rotor gearbox attachment on a Sea King at around 3,000 hours - you could set your watch by them).

So, that call in the Ops Center? Believe it or not, these midnight calls were not uncommon. It was almost always one of my peers at another base somewhere in Helmand saying they had found a crack, or their cab (read: helicopter) had a few 7.62 mm lightening holes added from a recent sortie, or something of that nature. Usually they wanted some advice on what to do, and sometimes they wanted me to come and do a formal assessment of the damage so we could figure out what to do with it.

By the time I reached the phone, laying off the hook on a plywood desk in a 12x24 tent on the nearside of the flight line, I already knew what I would say to one of the three likely peers on the other end.

“Okay, d***head, what have you f***ing idiots broken this time?” I silently gave myself a seven out of ten for delivery. Could do better; it’s all about timing.

There was a pause on the other end of the line, then “Is that Lieutenant Edwards?” Oh, crap. This guy sounded senior. He was. It turned out he was the Officer Commanding the air detachment of a bunch of bearded people who go around with black rectangles covering their eyes. That seven out of ten dropped to two – know your audience.

Thirty minutes later, I was dressed, plated Osprey body armour on, rifle in hand, and go-bag on my back, standing on the pan waiting for a Chinook. As I was panic dressing, I got a message out to my second in command that I was going somewhere to look at an aircraft. I didn’t know what type of aircraft, but I was going to find out soon.

As a general rule of thumb, flying from base to base in Afghanistan using the Royal Air Force’s daily passenger flights was a massive pain. Ask anyone who has done it; it makes TSA screening look painless. I hated doing it, so if a squadron needed us, I would usually ask them if we could use one of their not-broken helicopters. Most of the time, they were very obliging, as they were invariably in a rush to get their broken helicopter back to a not-broken configuration. These aircraft are in high demand, so we were normally thrown in with other people and kit when the aircraft was already en-route from somewhere else.

This time was different. The Chinook landed and the crewman walked down the ramp and over to me, confirmed who I was, and invited me onboard. What was unusual about this was the aircraft was empty and it had been sent specifically to pick me up. I was a junior Lieutenant who had only recently been allowed out the sight of wiser, more responsible senior non-commissioned officers; I did not get my own helicopter for trips. Something important must be broken.

We took off and I looked at my watch; it was around 0250. Based on the distances involved, and the fact that I had done this route a few times previously, I should be there sometime around 0400.

Settled in, helmet off, iPod playing, and reading a book, I was about 4 songs into the flight when the helicopter pitched up violently, decelerated hard, and hit the deck. I wasn’t expecting it. Fumbling, I was trying to put on my helmet (which was probably backwards), reach for my rifle, and process what was happening without puking. We should not be on the deck right now. I looked up and around; the crewmen were looking at me and in fits of laughter. One came over and shouted in my ear, “Relax! The pilot needed to get a brown-out landing in for currency.” Great. I smiled awkwardly and thought to myself, "Thanks a***hole, how about some warning next time? My underpants are now brown-out current again." What I actually said was, “Oh, okay!”

Seconds later, we were back in the air and on our way again. It took the rest of the flight for my heart rate to get back below 140 BPM.

When I arrived, the Good Commander I spoke to on the phone an hour or two earlier was waiting to meet me. We walked over to the helicopter that was the reason for my rude awakening. Except it was not a helicopter. It was a C-130.

Some things were starting to make sense at that point. This detachment had only one of these aircraft and it was a strategically important asset, so it made sense that there was so much urgency; the engines were probably still warm from when this happened. However, there was one tiny problem. I had approvals to design and approve any structural metallic or composite repair on any UK military helicopter. Nowhere on my letter of authority did it say anything about fixed-wing aircraft, let alone pressurised heavy air transport planes. I tried to explain this to the Good Commander as we walk, but I got the feeling he was aware of this and already 3 steps ahead of me.

We climbed aboard and walked to the back of the plane where a tiny shaft of light caught my eye. Sure enough, a bullet hole. Approximately 9mm diameter. Another question: how on earth did this aircraft get SAFIREd?

Quick side note: helicopters in warzones get shot quite a lot. They are slow, fly low, and usually go into, and out of, “hot” locations. C-130s, to the best of my limited knowledge of C-130 operations, don’t do any of those things, so tend not to get shot by small arms.

I looked more closely. The bullet hole was going from the inside out, not outside in, which is the more conventional way of getting shot. Standfast my last question. I turned around and looked at the Good Commander, who smiled awkwardly, knowing what I was about to tell him, so I refrained from asking who blew a hole in their own plane.

SITREP. I was standing in an aircraft I had never worked on and had no authority to design repairs for. It had a self-inflicted gunshot wound. And the Good Commander wanted to go flying.

He and I grabbed a seat and start talking. It turns out that, before he phoned me, and after he heard about the incident, he had been waking people up in the UK, including the aircraft design authority, and hatched this plan to get me out there. My job was to design a repair, do the analysis to verify the design to the best of my ability, and send that to the aircraft designers so they could put their rubber stamp on it. Simple. And the plan was a good one. But there was one minor problem.

From a static load point of view, designing a repair like this is agnostic of the category of aircraft. It really doesn’t matter. What does matter is the fatigue and damage tolerance aspects that you need to consider when working on pressurised aircraft.

Let me explain. The higher you go, the less oxygen is available. Generally, if you spend any time above 12,500 feet, you need supplemental oxygen (see 14 C.F.R. § 91.211 if you happen to be a regulation geek), which on most planes is accomplished by pressurising the cabin to a pressure greater than the outside ambient pressure. The side effect of doing this is that as the C-130 climbs to its cruising altitude, the fuselage is expanding like a balloon, which imparts additional stresses on the structure. If you want to see how getting this wrong will ruin your day, search for “Aloha 737” on Google and see what comes up.

Why is this important to us in the field? Whilst it doesn’t make the repair any harder to make and install, it makes it a lot harder to analyze. There are specialist programs that cost thousands of dollars that are written specifically to figure out how many times a fuselage can be “inflated” before it “pops.” I was sitting in the back of the plane with a 15-year old calculator, a notepad, and a pencil. There was a notable absence of $1,000+ damage tolerant software and their supporting computers. Nevertheless, there are ways to do a rough estimation, and I could use the design principles used by the aircraft designers to come up with something.

So that is what I did. The Good Commander left me to it, and I worked through the night to come up with a design, do what I could to support that design with some calculations, and call back to my second in command to tell him to pack up the tools and come meet me. The design got sent back to the aircraft design organization three or four hours later, and within 30 minutes, I got a one-liner back giving me the thumbs up.

We were on.

The rest of the repair went pretty much without incident, and when all was done, the Good Commander got a couple of helicopters arranged to take us and our kit back home (that turned out to be another story, but for another time).

So, what’s different today?

Clearly, I am sitting writing this in a more forgiving environment, and a lot has happened in my professional and personal life between now and then, but so many things are still the same. I still love engineering, aviation, and working with like-minded people. Recently, I have found myself designing modifications for civilian planes, almost by accident. I have never worked on these aircraft, and I am still pretty unfamiliar with some of the specific FAA regulations that apply to this work, but just like that C-130 repair, I’m here, doing what I love, and relishing the challenge of learning new things on very tight timelines.

I truly believe that aerospace engineering is one of the most fascinating fields you can work in and I would recommend it to anyone. Today, I am a volunteer for the Institute of Engineering and Technology, promoting engineering and supporting STEM events. I am also working with a university to help develop their master’s degree syllabus for a course on Aircraft and UAVs.

There are still challenges ahead (I am going through the green card process!) and I can’t tell you with certainty what I will be doing 2 years from now, though I have a few goals to aim for.

But if you made it this far, thank you for reading, and I want to thank those people close to me who have helped me get this far. You all know who you are, and I am eternally grateful for everything you do and sacrifice.