I have been busy...Yep..."Meatspace" has sunk its claws into me...So I have found it difficult to find time to blog. I am working a lot, To those that don't know, I am a commercial Chemtrail Technician, and right now it is busy, unless it is broke, or out of time or scheduled maintenance...it is flying. Commercial aviation uses a rolling maintenance schedule to maintain its "Airworthiness" on the airframe and powerplant. Unlike a private plane that gets an annual every year than an occasional overhaul, Commercial planes have a rigid schedule for maintenance checks, they are called "service", Transit" or a variation of a "Letter" check all the way to overhaul. And a lot of the parts are governed by hours and cycles. My employer uses "predictive Maintenance" to schedule parts changes especially on parts that have a cycle life. A cycle is one takeoff and landing. Aviation parts are built to such a high tolerance and bench marked to work statistically past a certain point. My employer knows this and schedules parts changes before the part is "scheduled to fail" so we get the plane in and handled before it breaks, swap out the part, and check out anything else then turn the plane loose again. This is why our reliability is so high in the industry. This is expensive to do and a lot of carriers don't do this because this entails having a vendor supply chain and a logistics support for the parts. We charge more than some because of the reliability factor. Unless the"Extenuating Factors like the FAA NOTAM System or something like that....." If we have any say, the plane lands when it is suppose to and leaves when it is supposed to with no deviation, Maintenance delays are no excuse. I say all that to say that I have been very busy, and to keep my anonymity I don't announce my employer on my blog, back in 2016 and 2020, I had some of my former Ford Peeps, they were suffering with TDS try to get me fired from my employer because I being a former union rep strayed off the reservation and wouldn't support the donk candidates. The hate is real so I wish to keep my job, I hope y'all understand.
Some goings on here at Casa De Garabaldi, I have been busy and finally had a bit of downtime after coming home from work, the weather was cooperative and my truck was dirty, so after doing some yard work, I washed er performed the raindance of the southern people, LOL,
The ladder is for us vertically challenged people, the new F150 sits a bit higher than "the Precious" was.
She is clean until the trees continue shedding their pollen and the cars develop their protective yellow coating.
Remember ""Back In October 2020" I had installed a battery powered light over my trash can and I finally noticed that the lights were getting dim so it was time to change it.
Well I removed it, popped the cover off and access the battery cover,
Yep "4 D-batteries from back in 2020", replaced them, and reinstalled the light.
Yes it works, and for a gizmo I put up almost 4 years ago, I ain't complaining.
I had also gone to Home depot to pick up some dirt, I had some plants to transplant and we had gotten some new tomato plants plus I still had my tomato plants from last year, yes they survived because I moved them into the garage when there was a cold snap so the frost never got them.
How they were before I transplanted them.
Afterwards, they got the much larger "Homer" Buckets. Plus the new plants went to the "Homer"
buckets. The 'mater plants will have more room.
I also have what I call a "Mature Spider Plant" or "Senior Spider"
Yep there he is, and the big thing on the tailgate is what he is going into, he had way outgrown the pot he was in. When I finally moved him and repotted him, he looked much happier.
This was the plant right after I removed him from the pot, you can see how compacted he was by looking at the root system..
I saw this coming home from Griffin Georgia, that is where I went to the Home Depot, to get the stuff for the plants, You know that you are in middle Georgia when you see stuff like that., LOL I prefer that home depot to my local home depot because of the location, my local home depot is located in a shopping center with target and a bunch of other shops and unless you go early in the morning, you have a hell of a time getting out because of the gridlock traffic. I had gone to Home Depot because I had gotten giftcards and were using them.
I had gone to Lowes the past weekend on a Sunday and worked on a quick project, I no longer have a truckbox and a plastic tote I have was just sliding around the back, so I had an idea for a quick project.
I made a "T" there is a notch in my bedliner where you can put a "2x4", well I divided it in half, and the tote, you can see it in the background of this picture sits on one part, and it no longer slides all over the bed, and my doing it this way also keeps it near the tailgate.
You can see it there, it works good for the tote, but not so well for all the bags of dirt I bought, LOL.
Now on to some rants.
Now onto a couple of minor rants, first off "Brandon" decided to "Forgive" another round in student loans. This really ticked me off, first off it leaves the root problem unsolved, that the colleges push these worthless degrees on these kids, and these same colleges have billions in endowments but the word on the street is that they will raise tuition by 20,000 or more because they know that there is more "Forgiveness" in the pipeline. So these same kids go to college, they go for a semester or 2 drop out, and they got this nut they have to deal with, and they have to get a job to pay the nut off and they cannot bankrupt it. Or the kid stays in and graduates and the degree is worthless and they have a bigger nut to deal with. The cost of tuition has increased 3 times the rate of inflation, even in the times of Xiden, then they have to get a job to service the larger nut. and if they choose poorly, they can't get a job and in many cases they are indoctrinated in school. Also on top of it a lot of the kids finance their lifestyle in school on student loan debt. I know this because some of my kin did this while in school and stayed past the 4 years because of changing majors. But this is a big "screw you" to the working class because it makes us pay for the debt of mostly democrat supporters. Those of us that either didn't go to school, or paid for school ourselves with the G.I Bill or paid off our loans or found other ways to get our certified smarts to make it in this world. I see more of this coming down in the future as the Donks try to buy more supporters and gin up the votes for the 2024 election to prevent the bloodbath that Xiden is expecting.
Besides thumbing his nose at the Supreme court over this issues, all he is doing is paying off the debt of a bunch of rich democrats and their kids and leaving the rest of us on the hook, and I am hearing that some of them are talking about going back to school for overseas studies, or grad programs so they can go back into debt again and hopefully Xiden or some other donk will have the tax payers pay it off again, so they can climb higher on the social class on the back of the middle class that has to pay their bills and get taxed more because Xiden is hustling for more votes trying to keep from getting steamrolled by Trump in 2024. unless they can get the illegals on the hook to vote...or they can arrange the steal like they did in 2020.
And speaking of Xiden, our vegetable in chief has declared war on the car, he wants to totally phase out the internal combustion engine and have the automakers make nothing but EV's in 2032. I have a lot of issues with this. For starters, our electrical grid can't handle that many electrical cars. Also something else to think about, EV's don't like the cold or excessive heat, the batteries don't produce a charge. You want to see a disaster, see somebody's Tesla blocking the interstate when people are trying to evacuate during a hurricane and the EV croaks because they have been idleing for hours and the battery is dead...and there are no charging stations around, you can't just dump a 5 gallons of battery juice into it and expect it to run. Also, extreme cold makes them not happy, ask those folks in Chicago and New York how their cars worked during the extreme cold snaps.
There is another angle to his war on the gas cars, he and the other elitist want you and me to be stuck in battery powered econoboxes...Imagine the modern version of this...
But with batteries......and limited range. and you can't go far because they will not be designed to.
Remember in the past, I and others have blogged about "15 Minute City" and all you would need is a golf cart where our betters would keep us trapped where we would need our papers to travel outside, because they want a modern age feudalism where we tug on our forelocks when our "betters" walk by by dint of their education, politics, or family connection they are destined to rule us because they know what is best for us "dirt people. and to continue on my rant. We will be consigned to the EV econo'box, you think "Uncle Joe" and his kind will give up their classic cars?
Hell no, they will become status symbols of the rich and connected. Cost isn't an issue for them, they have a totally separate outlook than we do. in the future, you want to know who is a mover and shaker? if they show up in a gas powered car, they are connected the inner party,
It is all about consumption, you have already seen the articles on "the Atlantic" and other leftie magazines, saying that we need to cut our consumption, but this doesn't pertain to the "cloud people" just us "Dirt People". We have to cut back, we have to eat the cricket burgers er "Fake Meat" and overprocessed food, whereas the cloud people will get the real meat and veggies. We will be expected to suck it up for the sake of the planet, but they won't. It is all about consumption, they want to consume and they don't want us to, they hate that the regular people live almost as good as they do unlike the old days, there was a real dichotomy between the poor and the rich, the technology has closed the gap massively and the cloud people hate it. what happened to the new age of neo-feudalism if the dirt people live almost as good as they do and tell them to pound sand...the disrespect!, the Horror!, this can't be, the dirt people must be put in their place. to be used as resources then cast away when their use is at an end.
The former editor of NPR you know "National Proletariat Radio" er National Public Radio made a comment that the paper had lost their viewers because of the rampant activism of their current staffing and editors, well to the people in the real world, we had known that they had leaned far left many years ago and jumped the shark when President Trump got elected.
I guess when you become the deep state run media for the donks and the hard left, credibility issues were sure to happen especially when your regular listeners hear the crap y'all are pumping our and it don't match with their reality when they are going to the grocery store. But I can understand them being in the tank for Xiden, because they have to try to save his presidency because he is "their" man despite...
Yeah that pesky crappy fiscal policy is going to bite him in the butt.
And finally my friend "Mack" scored me a Hooters mug like he promised he would :) so I was very happy. We get together when we can and shoot the crap and eat wings at his favorite Hooters. he is a regular there and he has sold all the girls there their EDC, and they like him, but they love his wife more. I don't blame them, she is a class act and a sweetheart.
I have been working a lot of overtime, I have a rant percolating and I do want to post it before it gets too old and starts to expire like old milk.
I saw this article on Bongino Reports, and I thought it was telling of the new generation and what the schools have been doing to the new generation.
Creating useless Americans hasn’t always been easy.
After all, for most of America’s history, the church was strong, kids were expected to do some work and there was no welfare. The attitude wasn’t quite, “If you don’t work, enjoy starving to death because that’s what you deserve,” but there was definitely a little of that vibe going around. Americans outfought everyone from the Indians to the Mexicans to the British to conquer America, made it through the Depression, won two world wars, and built a reputation as an independent, self-reliant, religious, gun-totin’, hard-working, patriotic people.
How do you take people that come from that kind of stock and make them useless? Well, there are ways if you’re dedicated enough. Especially if you start young. For example:
1) Raise them to be fragile and afraid of everything: Keep a constant eye on your kid. Always make sure there’s an adult around him, ready to tell him what to do and settle any disputes. Know where he is every second of the day. Be his friend. Don’t ever push him to really challenge himself, try and fail at things, or deal with anything difficult on his own.
When he has challenges, smooth all of them out for him. If he’s failing a class, blame his teacher. If he’s afraid to do something, tell him he doesn’t have to do it. Certainly, don’t ever let him go off by himself, do anything risky, or put his self-esteem on the line trying something he could fail at.
Protect him from those challenges. Make sure he needs a “safe space” from hearing ideas he disagrees with and needs your help to do things like put on a tie, order from a restaurant, or maybe even make a phone call. Create the kind of kid that will hyperventilate, break down in tears, and make a TikTok video about “microaggressions” three times a week.
2) Give your child a sense of entitlement: What could be more important than your child’s sense of self-esteem? That’s why you’ve got to work non-stop to convince your child that she’s special! She’s amazing! She’s incredible just the way that she is! Why, she’s a princess who deserves to have the world handed to her on a silver platter! She deserves to have everyone like her, get A’s in school, and be treated with deference and maybe even a little awe, just like mommy (and if she’s lucky) daddy does at home.
Based on what you may ask? Based on WHO SHE IS as a person. Essentially, convince this kid she’s the main character in a movie and everyone else from the people she runs across, to boyfriends to her boss at work are all the extras. Everybody owes her and she owes nobody! “You go girl” and if anyone disagrees with you or expects you to perform, well, it’s probably because they have a small penis or hate women or something!
3) Nurse a sense of victimhood: What happens when you take a child and convince him that he’s the center of the universe just because he’s so amazing, but don’t help him gain any of the real-world skills it takes to be elite at… well, anything? That child is very likely to think of himself as a victim.
The “they” that are supposedly keeping him down may vary quite a bit. It could be white Americans, black Americans, conservatives, Christians, Jews, Asians, straight people, “the system,” capitalism, society, the rich, landlords, bosses, men, women, or some other boogeyman, but the key thing here is to encourage that sense of victimhood. The more this child nurses grievances and blames others for his failures, the less likely he is to address his own shortcomings and improve himself.
The more people embrace victimhood, the greater their sense of helplessness becomes. We’re looking to create the sort of people here who think the solution to their lack of skills is for the government to raise the minimum wage.
4) Encourage mental illness: There have always been mentally ill people, but never before has a society worked harder than ours to nurture mental illness in its citizens. The overwhelming majority of older Americans went through their entire life without ever considering whether they were the wrong gender. Not anymore.
Now we literally have teachers, counselors, therapists, some terrible parents, and wackos on social media encouraging children to question their gender and sexuality practically from the time they get out of diapers, all the way through high school.
Furthermore, should it surprise anyone that kids today have out-of-control anxiety? When we were kids, our parents shooed us out of the house, told us to be back by dark, and had no idea where we were all day. We figured out a lot of things on our own because we didn’t have any other choice. Today, kids are babied so much that they don’t know how to do anything and many of them get to 18 without ever having done something of significance on their own. No wonder they’re “anxious.” They don’t know how to do ordinary tasks people used to be able to handle easily at 12 without someone holding their hands.
Along similar lines, is it shocking that depression is so prevalent among kids today? Kids spend all day feeling bad about themselves because they spend all day on social media looking at other kids who have more money, friends, genetic gifts, and fame than 99% of the planet. Then, they deal with the toxicity of the web, feel isolated because most of their friends are just names and voices on a screen they’ll never meet, and marinate in the completely ridiculous, over-the-top outrage bait, hatemongering and prophecies of doom that make up the media today and we wonder why they’re depressed?
If younger Americans seem mentally unstable today, it’s because many of them really are unstable. We’ve gone from encouraging kids to get ready for adulthood, to creating mental disorders in kids they’ll have to deal with for decades after they become an adult.
5) Destroy the quality of education: It’s no secret that much of America’s public education system is in deep decline. In some areas, heavily controlled by the Left, taxpayers are paying Rolls-Royce prices for schools that provide a third-world education for students:
About one-sixth of all third-grade students in Chicago Public Schools can read at grade level. For low-income and minority students, the share of proficient readers is even lower. ...In CPS in 2022, just 17.3% of students could read at grade level by the end of third grade. Only 6% of the 457 Chicago schools for which the Illinois State Board of Education recorded proficiency rates among third graders had at least half of third-grade students reading at grade level. There were 82 schools in which no third-grade students were proficient at reading.
Kids constantly complain (with good reason) that they’re not learning enough practical life skills. Additionally, our schools aren’t great at teaching foreign languages or history compared to many other nations. How about PE? Are our schools churning out healthy, fit kids like they used to in say the sixties? Yeah, not so much. All this is despite the fact that the US spends more per pupil than any other nation in the world other than Luxembourg, Norway, and Iceland, which have a grand total of less than 7 million residents combined. That hardly makes them comparable to us.
Starting kids out with a second-rate education helps keep them behind the 8-ball for their entire lives. You want a useless kid? Well, our school system has a big role to play in creating them.
6) Convince them morals don’t matter: How do you make a rotten person? There’s no better start than a child growing up without a dad in the home, whether that’s because of a crushing divorce or because mom never bothered to get married in the first place.
From there, definitely don’t take them to church, where they’ll hear about God as they get lectures about right and wrong every week. Instead, just let them just pick up their morals from whatever happens to be the most entertaining. You know… rock stars, video games, Reddit, green-haired, androgynous schoolteachers, furry forums, over-the-top influencers, pornography, whatever.
Get them to the point where they think right and wrong is totally situational and dependent on whether it benefits them, what makes them sound “cool,” and whether they’re sympathetic toward any potential victim.“Corporations? It’s fine to steal their stuff. Asians? Screw those try-hards! They deserve to get attacked almost as much as the Jews and the Maga guys! Wait though, you can’t disagree with that guy! He’s trans!”
After enough time immersed in this kind of culture, you can create someone who bizarrely comes to believe that they’re a very moral person, even though they personally have no principles at all and even have a general dislike for human beings that actually do have a real moral code.
7) Make them Unpatriotic: Making a kid unpatriotic isn’t all that hard. For one thing, patriotism doesn’t just happen. It has to be taught. In entertainment. In schools, in church, at home. If you don’t do that, well, your work is mostly done.
It’s not all that hard to even make kids actively UNPATRIOTIC. Every country has done lots of things wrong, so just focus on those things in school while you go light on America’s many great accomplishments. Go on and on about the “rights” kids have without ever talking about their responsibilities. Don’t talk about what kids owe other people or their country. Encourage that sense of entitlement instead. Downplay all the great things about this nation and focus on the stuff other nations give away for “free” without ever talking about any of the downsides that come with it, like insanely high taxes.
You can even ramp it up to the point where you have people demanding that we tear down statues of the Founding Fathers and athletes disrespecting the American flag just to get attention. If you don’t love your country and want it to succeed, what good are you going to be to it? Not much. Not much at all.
I decided to do a "Monday Music" today, been a bit since I have done one of those. For some reason since Easter This song was gnawing on the background as an excellent choice for a "Monday Music", so since my muse has been dormant lately, but is starting to stir again, I figured I would listen.
I remember this song making big airplay on MTV, y'all remember MTV? they used to play music videos instead of all those insipid reality shows. well this song was in heavy rotation and I liked the song and face it, Patty Smyth was cute as a button in the video and I was 16 years old back in 1982..Priorities you know, LOL Even now, sure it is a bit campy like a lot of the 80's songs are but it reminds me of a time I call "Reagans America" where a President loved America and believed that we are this shining light on the hill and he made everyone else believe it also. To me the 80's were a good decade.
Scandal is a self-titled debut EP by American rock band Scandal, released in 1982 by Columbia Records. Although the EP was never released on CD, all five of the EP's songs along with the "Goodbye to You" B-side "All My Life" are found on the VH1 Scandal compilation albumWe Are the '80s (2006).[2] An alternate photo from the same photoshoot of the EP was used for the VH1 compilation cover as well as Playlist: The Very Best of Scandal (2008), with the track listing for Playlist being identical to We Are the '80s.[3] All five of the EP's songs can also be found on the remastered and expanded 2014 Rock Candy Records version of Scandal's 1984 album Warrior.
The song was written by band member Zack Smith. It appeared on Scandal's 1982 Scandal EP. It hit #5 on Billboard's Album Rock play list. The song was also released as a single, and reached #65 on the Billboard Hot 100.
The video shows Patty Smyth in a bright red dress singing the lyrics to various members of the band as they perform the song. Scandal keyboardist Benjy King is shown playing a rare Digital Keyboards Synergy synthesizer, which provided the main 8th note foundation of the track; though he is not shown in the video, the song features Late Show with David Letterman's bandleader and sidekick Paul Shaffer playing a solo—based on Del Shannon's "Runaway" on an Oberheim OB-Xa.
1After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.
2There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the stone and sat on it. 3His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow. 4The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men.
5The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. 6He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. 7Then go quickly and tell his disciples: ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ Now I have told you.”
8So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. 9Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. 10Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
The Guards’ Report
11While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. 12When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, 13telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ 14If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.” 15So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day.
The Great Commission
16Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. 17When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted. 18Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.19Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,20and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age
When I worked on slides and Emergency doors, I followed the maintenance manual religiosly, having a slide deploy is not a thing that I want to happen. Also something else that most don't know is that the standard to empty an airplane of all passengers and crew, and get everyone out is 45 seconds. The standard was set because of an accident on a "Boeing 737" that during a takeoff, one of the engines decided to "FOD itself" and punctured fuel tanks and the resulting fumes, not the fire killed almost half of the passengers. The resulting investigation made huge changes in safety and training and the making of material inside of the aircraft to minimize fumes. A little over 20 years later, another B737 had another engine fire and "Everyone escaped with 4 people having minor injuries." No I am not disparaging the B737, she is a damm good plane. Both instances were not the planes fault, but the engines.
I saw this article and I thought it was worth "clipping"
Latecoere has aimed to simplify door opening and positioning to speed up evacuation times.
Credit: Latecoere
In the rare event of an emergency cabin evacuation, successful egress depends on how well the exit doors and their built-in escape slides and actuators perform.
A quick emergency exit from an aircraft depends on two categories of doors, explains Thierry Eftymiades, senior vice president for engineering at Toulouse-based Latecoere, a manufacturer of cabin doors for commercial airliners and business jets. The first category consists of passenger-entry and service doors, which are opened and closed during regular aircraft cycles. The second category applies only to emergency-use doors, including cockpit escape and overwing emergency-exit doors (OWEED).
Eftymiades says Latecoere uses “functional and customer analyses” to define and specify in detail customer expectations for each door.
“These analyses help to optimize the design and manufacturing technologies as well as the development process to reduce recurring and nonrecurring costs,” he explains. “Design trends are focused on composites, specifically thermoset and thermoplastics from our composite development center.”
Major inspections of escape slides are performed every 3-5 years. Credit: AJW Technique
Another Latecoere design trend involves the “kinematics” on new types of mechanisms, Eftymiades says. “That has been driven by the regulations, which continue to evolve, while taking into consideration the events faced in real-life emergency landing conditions,” he notes. “In that regard, we have been granted specific patents to simplify the mechanisms’ actuation.”
Eftymiades cites, for example, simplified door opening and positioning that clears the way for outboarding passengers within an evacuation target of less than 90 sec. “The common objective is to make the opening as obvious and easy to use as possible,” he says.
Ease of activation is particularly important under adverse conditions that can make opening doors more challenging, Eftymiades stresses. Those conditions include high winds, fuselage icing and an awkward position of the aircraft due to collapsed landing gear or a side crash.
“[The] current development and innovation focus is on increasing robustness and decreasing costs through specific simple but high-efficiency design items taking into consideration these kinds of adverse conditions,” he says. “These design items can be selected as building blocks while defining the door baseline architecture.”
Escape slides must be inflated to carry out leak and pressure tests on the tubes. Credit: AJW Technique
Despite evolving requirements and greater system complexity, aircraft doors are becoming lighter, Eftymiades points out.
“Doors are complex systems with multiple and contradictory requirements,” he says. “They need to stay closed in flight but opened safely under all conditions, leading to optimized choices to be made. Door weight optimization can be provided for at all project stages, from concept to detail design generation.”
Eftymiades adds that during an emergency cabin evacuation, three subsystems come into play: the door, an ejector that assists emergency opening by pushing the door open and the slide. He emphasizes that during the design phase, discussions take place with the slide supplier to decide on the quality of the interfaces among the subsystems; Latecoere does not manufacture slides.
“Generally, for a passenger door, there are four types of interfaces with the slide,” he says. “They are the structural attachment of the panel holding the slide to the bottom of the door; the panel between the slide and the door lining; the laces between the slide and the bar holding the slide with the door open; and the controlled door ejection speed component, allowing the slide to be deployed safely, especially under adverse conditions.”
OWEEDs are smaller than passenger entry and service doors and do not contain the slide, which is often located at a distant nonpressurized part of the fuselage, Eftymiades explains. “This requires defining the triggering subsystem—electrical or mechanical—-that will inflate the slide on the wing,” he says.
Fuselage-installed slides deploy on pilot command, saving the cabin crew the task of arming and disarming them. In contrast, cabin-door-mounted slides automatically deploy when the door is opened if they are not disarmed.
“Usually for overwing exits, the slide pack is located at the corner between the wing leading edge and the fuselage,” Eftymiades says. “During an emergency opening, the passenger has to walk on the wing to reach the slide location to evacuate.”
It generally takes 4-5 years and as many as 20-100 engineers, depending on the scope of the project, to bring a new door and escape system on stream, taking into account design, simulation and prototype tests, according to Eftymiades. The process also involves hundreds of stress analysis reports as well as test plans and reports, especially given the number of parts.
“For a regional airliner, there are about 500 part numbers for one passenger door and usually four doors per aircraft, plus 2-4 overwing exits,” Eftymiades notes. “For large commercial aircraft, the part numbers are 800 per door, with eight doors per aircraft. For the ejector—the emergency door-opening system—that is an additional 70 part numbers.”
Two other major aircraft door OEMs, Airbus and Collins Aerospace, declined to share their insights into door and escape system developments for this article. Airbus cited the recent Alaska Airlines inflight door-plug loss as to why; Collins did not provide a specific reason.
MAINTENANCE CONCERNS
Today’s escape slides are much lighter but more complex due to incorporation of additional features, according to Andy Wheeler, divisional vice president and managing director at AEM Ametek MRO. The UK-based company has facilities at Luton, Ramsgate and Stansted in England.
Some slides have pressure indicators that connect to the cockpit, for instance, while others contain gas generators and several are fitted with pneumatic door release components, Wheeler tells Inside MRO. “The main benefits are quicker actuation, fewer accidental deployments and improved safety features,” he notes, adding that some slides also incorporate lighting systems that are now brighter, lower energy and more efficient.
Wheeler reports that advancements in materials and design have led to better deployment, improved durability and lighter weight. “For instance, the slides used to be made of neoprene and are now polyurethane,” he says. “When lighting systems were introduced, they were chemical. Now they’re LED-battery-powered. Also, on newer aircraft, the inflation cylinders are composite instead of steel, and the slide’s enclosure—the packboards—fit into the fuselage rather than the doors.”
Wheeler stresses that regular maintenance and inspection of escape slide systems are essential to identify and address potential issues before they become problematic.
“The slides have to be maintained in accordance with the OEM component maintenance manual,” he stresses. “They require inflation to carry out leak and pressure tests on the tubes. The inflation cylinder must be hydrostatically tested and the valve overhauled and flow regulation adjustments made as necessary.”
Asked about the kinds of problems those inspections often reveal, Wheeler cites damaged light systems and low-pressure gauge indications as typical as well as cracks in the packboards from mishandling.
Louis Philippe Mallette, senior vice president of operations at AJW Technique in Montreal, reports that while “the fundamental design concept” of emergency cabin evacuation systems has remained largely consistent across newer aircraft, there have been some improvements, primarily involving materials and weight reduction.
“Advancements in material technology have led to lighter systems and quicker deployment during emergencies,” he says. “This is allowing manufacturers in some cases to extend maintenance intervals to five years while still demonstrating the required reliability over that period, thereby reducing operators’ costs.”
Despite these advancements, he says, “the interface between components and the main and over-wing exits” has remained similar to traditional designs. “Typically, the evacuation slide is still located on the door, maintaining consistency across generations of aircraft.”
Mallette stresses that as long as the slides are undisturbed, the evacuation systems are traditionally very reliable and will typically stay on wing for their full scheduled overhaul life of 3-5 years. “Where we do see issues is when they are disturbed for some reason by people servicing the aircraft, which is very often the case with front door systems and may result in an unplanned deployment,” he says.
Mallette adds that door-mounted packboards and slide actuators can be vulnerable to damage during scheduled airframe inspections, especially if technicians are careless. Accidental deployment during aircraft maintenance can also occur if the system is improperly handled or installed.
“The airframers have taken steps to reduce potential damage by providing comprehensive training and documentation for technicians on proper handling and installation procedures, implementing stringent quality control measures during maintenance and ensuring release mechanisms are protected from accidental activation,” Mallette says.
Given the risks he describes, Mallette was asked if the packboards and actuation components could be trending toward fuselage installations and away from the exit doors.
“No,” he says. “The current [design] remains consistent, with the slides in the packboard mounted on the door. One notable deviation from this pattern is observed with overwing slides, where the exit doors are physically smaller and have insufficient space for a door-mounted slide. Often the slide is airframe-mounted with a separate cylinder assembly also mounted within the fuselage. But this approach is limited to overwing slides at this point and from our experience hasn’t been extended to the main door slides.”
Mallette cites two main components as the focus of an evacuation system inspection: the inflatable slide and the air system that houses the cylinder containing the compressed gas and aspirators. “During scheduled maintenance, AJW will perform an inspection and overhaul of the cylinder assembly to ensure the regulator and the reservoir are still serviceable and functional,” he says. “Part of this process involves hydrostatic testing, which is a critical process used to evaluate the integrity of pressure vessels such as cylinders, and to detect any potential leaks or structural weaknesses.”
For the slide, the inspection focuses on its general condition—in particular looking for porosity, tears and leakages—including conducting an overpressure test.
“What we tend to see on aging slides are small tears at the folds, the buildup of porosity and weakness at the seams, all of which may result in a failure to maintain the pressure over a period,” Mallette says. “Minor tears can be repaired; however, with the older slides, we need to replace the full inflatable system.”
