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Field Ethos
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By Will Dabbs, MD
When I was a soldier, one of my fellow officers was unable to locate a pair of binoculars on a change of command inventory. That poor guy had a wife and two kids, and the Big Green Machine made him cough up $600 to cover the lost binos. At that time and in that place, $600 was a hefty chunk of change.
In my day, a combat aviation unit ran a bit like a business. The Army gave commanders a certain amount of money in a maintenance budget. Spare parts came out of that pot of cash. Big stuff like engines and transmissions took a proper bite.
One of our CH-47D Chinooks was en route to the National Training Center in California when it had a forward transmission chip light in the vicinity of Bakersfield. A chip light activates when a magnet oriented within the oil stream picks up enough metal shavings to complete a circuit. This system lends insight into when a transmission is coming apart. A chip light can be a pretty big deal.
Under the Hood
The boys landed, cleaned the thing off, and ran it up again only to find that the chip light activated a second time. That meant that the aircraft needed a new transmission. At the time, a CH-47D forward transmission cost the Army about a quarter million dollars. It is likely way more expensive now.
We dutifully ordered a new Chinook forward transmission from the depot at Corpus Christi to be shipped to the little National Guard armory associated with the Bakersfield airfield. Shipping was going to take three days. To occupy themselves, the flight crew spent that time tearing down the old transmission. While doing so, they found that the hydraulic pump bolted onto the transmission was self-destructing. That’s where the chip light had come from. The transmission itself was fine.
The maintenance guys took a new hydraulic pump out of our unit supply and FedEx’d it to Bakersfield. A phone call to the depot ensured that we weren’t charged for the $250,000 Chinook transmission we no longer needed. The boys swapped out the hydraulic pump, purged the transmission, and readied themselves for a fun-filled month wallowing in the dirt in nearby Death Valley. As they were getting ready to blast off, they noticed a big honking truck deliver what looked suspiciously like a Chinook transmission to the Bakersfield National Guard Armory. They thought little else of it.
Abusing Government Waste
Six months later, another of our $28 million aircraft really did crap its forward transmission. It was two months before the end of the fiscal year, and we didn’t have the money left in the maintenance budget to buy a new Chinook tranny. It looked like this aircraft was going to sit around dead for two months for no good reason. That’s when I remembered the last time I had encountered a forward transmission for a CH-47D in the wild.
I tracked down a phone number for that Bakersfield guard unit and gently inquired regarding a giant steel box that might yet still be cluttering up the place. The frustrated NCO on the other end of the line said that they had called the phone number stenciled on the outside about a hundred times and then surrendered the thing to the California state DRMO (Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office). The DRMO is tasked to liquidate old stuff the military no longer needs.
I called the California National Guard DRMO and asked after the same big green box. The DRMO guy said they planned to auction off this brand new Chinook transmission for scrap the following week just to get it out from underfoot. I asked if I showed up in a big Army helicopter in two days would they just give it to me? The DRMO guy said, sure. That would save them the trouble of having to fart with it.
The following week our pirated Chinook transmission was turning and burning atop our previously-broken airplane. Nobody ever asked where it came from, and the depot never called looking for it. As near as I could tell, that quarter million dollars just evaporated. But my long-suffering buddy still had to pay for those stupid binoculars.
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