Back in June, I wrote about how the Maintenance Coordinator for the club’s Lance is downright secretive. Today, Vicki, Laura and I went confidently out to the airport for a flight we’d scheduled last week, taking the Lance out to Albany to spend Thanksgiving at Stevie’s new apartment. We loaded our luggage in the luggage compartment, and Vicki and Laura went back into the FBO while I preflighted. I open the front door and sit down, and there is a sign taped to the yoke saying the plane is grounded. Oh oh. I do a quick walk around and discover that the wingtip appears to have been scraped by somebody or something, and it’s taken off the navlight/strobe fixture, the guts of which are held in place by scotch tape.
Ok, now I’m mad, because when the plane is grounded, the Maintanance Coordinator is supposed to mark the plane as grounded in ScheduleMaster, our on-line scheduling system so that people don’t expect that they’re going to be able to use it for a trip and don’t find out until they get to the airport that there is a known problem with it.
I head back to the ops room to check ScheduleMaster to see if any of the other planes are available. That’s when I discover something that made me 300% madder still – the squawk list shows that this wing navlight/strobe was squawked on 10/8, over 6 weeks ago! The squawk says that the person reporting it immediately called the Maintenance Coordinator. But the Maintenance Coordinator has let this plane sit there grounded for 6 fucking weeks without letting anybody know!
I called the VP of Maintenance, and he didn’t know either. He says that when it happened, Bill, the Maintenance Coordinator, said he would get it fixed that very week, and he’d assumed Bill had done that. I told him that this is totally unacceptable, and either he removes Bill as Maintenance Coordinator, or I’m going to join Artisan club instead. He asked me if I wanted to “move up” to Maintenance Coordinator, and I said sure.
Meanwhile, none of the other club planes are booked for a long trip, just for a few hours here and there. I call the guy who has the Dakota booked for Friday morning when we are planning to return, and he says he is booked to have some instruction in it so he can’t easily reschedule. One of the Archers is free except that somebody has it right now and isn’t due to return for a few hours. So the choice is to wait three hours and then fly, or drive now. Both options won’t get us there until after dark. So we elect to drive.
I think it’s time to check out the costs at Artisan. I know they’re a smaller, more expensive club and I don’t like their fleet balance quite as much (other than a Lance, they’ve got a couple of Arrows and a Warrior, and an Arrow doesn’t haul anywhere near what a Dakota does), but they actually put money into their Lance (including a Garmin 530) and it gets flown.