Chapter 80 Improvement Tools
Flying is a noble cause. Before taking off, every pilot will polish his leather shoes to a shine, scrape off the mud on the soles, clean them thoroughly, and then take the ground staff vehicle straight to the fighter plane.
Although this is a kind of belief and determination in one's own career, it is also a necessary practice at the same time.
Fighter planes are not civilian airliners and have to perform various complex maneuvers in the air. If you enter the cockpit with dirt under your feet, then after takeoff, the cabin will begin to pressurize and all that dirt, such as sand, hair, airport weeds, etc., will all fly up. When the plane is overloaded during flight, these things can hit your face or eyes at any time and cause an accident!
Therefore, pilots must pay attention to personal hygiene. Growing a beard is not allowed, and they must shave clean before taking off!
Even so, the cabin will not remain intact. After a period of time, usually half a month, the cabin will need to be thoroughly cleaned.
In later times, Andre mainly tested the domestically produced J-11 fighter, which still used the imported K-36 ejection seat. It must be said that this ejection seat is indeed the most advanced. The Chinese-made HTY-5 ejection seat equipped on the J-10 has a much smaller ejection envelope than the K-36, and its stability in complex postures is not as good as the K-36.
What Andre remembered most was that a crane was needed to remove the ejection seat! Two people couldn't lift it! The Soviet equipment was all about durability.
But now, technology is far less advanced than that of later generations. The ejection seat of the MiG-25 is still the KM-1. Andre is very dissatisfied with the ejection seat equipped on the MiG-21. Many times, Andre wants to save himself and drive the plane to an emergency landing, but he is unwilling to use this ejection seat, especially at high speeds, as that would definitely be courting death.
And the focus of cleaning the cockpit this time is to remove the seats!
Three MiG-25 fighters that had just reached the cleaning cycle had already parked on the tarmac. With the main leaders of the regiment acting as referees and most of the regiment's maintenance and ground crew acting as referees, the maintenance competition officially began!
As a whistle blew, three mechanics quickly ran towards the fighter planes they were maintaining and started the competition.
For convenience, a platform has been prepared in advance. You can just climb up and start. It is much faster than climbing the gangway.
With a screwdriver in hand, the first step is to remove the cockpit cover. There are more than a hundred screws densely packed around it, and all of them must be removed before it can be removed.
Victor also climbed onto the platform. He watched others quickly tightening the screws. Instead of being in a hurry, he took out an electric drill from the toolbox next to him.
Ivanov became anxious when he saw Victor connect a drill bit to the electric drill and then point it at the nut.
The game cannot be disrupted! Is this guy going to drill the screw down? Will the position of the screw hole be damaged? At this moment, he saw that there was an extra object on the electric drill in Victor's hand. It was the removed nut!
In order to win this competition, Victor put in a lot of effort. Within two days, he made this improved electric drill. The drill bit in the front was turned into a screwdriver!
Just like that, while others were still working hard to tighten the screws, Victor had easily removed more than a hundred screws amid the buzzing sound of the electric drill!
"No! This is against the rules!" The other two veteran mechanics couldn't help but shout when they saw Victor already starting to use professional tools to remove the cockpit cover, but hadn't even removed one-third of the screws.
If I were to say something else, perhaps my skills were not as good as Victor, who had just arrived, but cleaning the cockpit was the basic skill of every mechanic.
Unexpectedly, I lost at the first step! Victor actually used power tools!
"In maintenance, we encourage the invention of new tools to simplify our operations!" Victor shouted from below: "The game continues."
Electric screwdriver! It is widely used in later generations, which greatly saves effort and time. In this era, there is still no such tool. And Victor is really smart and came up with such an idea! It seems that letting him be the maintenance captain is definitely the best choice!
Mechanics also need to use their brains, not be rigid! Andrei couldn't help but think of the future. When the Su-27 was first introduced, the ground crew repaired it according to the standards of the Sukhoi Company. For example, when inspecting the radar on the nose, the radome must be unscrewed and removed on the ground. This is nothing, it just takes more effort, but there will be problems when installing it. Su-27 fans all know that the nose of the Su-27 is tilted downward. The round nose has uniform screw holes, and it can be installed even if one screw hole is wrong, but if the cone is deviated by a few degrees, the aerodynamic characteristics will change completely.
Later, a mechanic invented a screw. After it was fixed, the radome could be repaired by just flipping it up. When the Russians came to China and found this solution, they couldn't help but give a thumbs up.
If you want to be a qualified mechanic, you must learn to use your brain! Andre thought as he watched Victor remove the seat and directly lift it out from the platform. This KM-1 ejection seat is really quite crude!
Then, Victor began to clean the seat bit by bit with a brush, and then jumped in to clean the area under the seat.
When Victor started to reinstall the seat, the other two mechanics had just removed the canopy! It was not their fault. In aircraft maintenance, they had always left such trivial tasks as removing screws to their subordinates. Now, just removing these screws made them sweat profusely!
Forty minutes! Victor completed the task that would have taken two people an hour in just forty minutes! Warm applause broke out on the tarmac!
In the morning race, Victor was the best, and in the afternoon race, Victor was far ahead again. This time, it was a purely physical job, dismantling the engine!
The engine of the MiG-25 fighter has a lifespan of only 150 hours. For the maintenance personnel, replacing the engine is even more common. According to the current frequency of sorties, an aircraft can fly at least 300 hours a year, which means that the engine needs to be replaced twice!
This time, Victor pushed up a rack that was welded together last night using scrap materials from the base. It was equipped with a pulley device. With the help of this device, Victor removed the engine by himself, while the other mechanics had to work in groups of two or three to complete the task.
"I declare Victor as the new captain of the maintenance brigade!" Faced with Victor's outstanding performance, the old man Kozhedub said reluctantly.