Now You Have A Mark

While flying in Texas as a flight school instructor, I had some great experiences flying little helicopters that we used to say were made by Mattel, the toy maker. It would be hard to say which was the more exciting and challenging, teaching people to fly helicopters or surviving some of the things they got the instructors into. I am sure I challenged my instructors!

One of the things that student pilots were taught was to check the flying machine with a fine tooth comb. On a helicopter there are many moving parts and they all fly around with opposing forces. The trick was to keep them together and doing what they were supposed to do. Everything that can be seen and checked was reviewed before the flight. Things were looked at, touched, felt and tried; in order to make sure that this marvelous machine was really going to work.

One of the little things we checked was the tail rotor driveshaft. The helicopter had a tail boom that was a six-inch diameter tube. Inside of that tube was a very thin hollow tube, the driveshaft, which spun and transmitted the power to the tail rotor and made it turn. At the front it was connected to the transmission and on the back it was connected to a gearbox that turned the tail rotor.

On the top of the tail boom, the big tube, in the front and back was a small hole about an inch in diameter. The pilot was to look through the front hole and turn the inner tube until a black mark came in sight and was centered in the opening. Then with the front mark lined up, the pilot was to go to the back end of the tail boom and look through that hole. There he should see another mark on the driveshaft. Seeing that mark told the pilot that the shaft was in good condition and was not twisted or starting to fail. If the mark could not be seen the aircraft was not to be flown.

One day while training a student pilot I lined up the front mark in the hole and went to the back of the aircraft and found no mark. I returned to the front of the aircraft and checked to make sure that the mark had not moved and found it to still be in place. One more time I checked for the mark at the back end of the tail boom. There was no mark in sight. This was a good teaching moment for the student so I showed him that there was no mark in sight and told him maintenance would have to fix the aircraft.

In every aircraft there was a three ring binder that had a number of forms in it. One of these forms was for the pilots to record problems or discrepancies with the aircraft. I took out the book and started recording the discrepancy to show the student how this was done.

As I was getting my pencil out to write, I noticed a mechanic driving by in a pickup. I flagged him down to tell him we would need a replacement aircraft and that this one was not flyable. He asked me what the problem was. I told him about the missing mark on the drive shaft and he wanted to know if I had written up the problem. Of course I told him that I was just getting to that when I saw him and I hoped he could get me the tail number of a replacement aircraft while I was writing this one up.

Then in front of the student and myself, the maintenance man checked to make certain the front mark was properly aligned and then walked to the back of the tail boom and looked down the hole. He couldn’t see any mark either. We were stunned as we watched him pull a magic marker out of his pocket and put a mark on the drive shaft. He then turned and said, “There ya’ go. Now you have a mark". Although I was surprised by what I saw, I regained my composure and asked if that’s what the maintenance department always did when they couldn’t see the second mark. His response was, “Yeah, we do this every night when the aircraft come in the hanger to be checked over! If they need a mark, we give them a mark".

This deserved more investigation so I asked him how he knew the shaft wasn’t twisted. This is what this checking of marks was supposed to be all about. He told us that the shaft didn’t look twisted to him. Of course not, it was inside of a tube that you can’t see through; that’s why we have this mark system. If Maintenance just pulled out a magic marker and put a mark there when they couldn’t see any mark, there could have beeen two, three, four, or who knows how many marks on the shaft as it was slowly twisting and failing.

I returned to the logbook and wrote not only the fact that the aircraft did not have a visible mark when I checked it but that the mechanic had just pulled out his magic marker and put one there. After flying a different aircraft that already had a visible mark on it (who knows who put that one there) I wrote the entire episode up on a safety report and turned it in. From there I believe that all of the drive shafts were taken out of all of the aircraft and inspected for twisting and false marks. After that we just had to trust that the maintenance support was really checking to ensure that the drive shafts were not twisted and that they were not just adding a mark to satisfy pilots. But every time I checked for one of those marks on the drive shaft after that I couldn’t help but wonder if this was a false mark put there by someone who just wanted to satisfy the requirement of a mark. People who flew bet their lives on the mark being true!

There are marks in life that we trust to be planted correctly and accurately. We set our lives by these marks and trust that they will guide us safely through life. Everyone, but especially parents, leaders, and teachers set the marks that those behind them will follow. If we learn that a parent, a teacher, a political leader, our boss or anyone else has set a false mark we naturally wonder if anything they have told us is accurate. Can we trust anything that comes from them? When we set a mark for someone to follow let’s not just pull a magic marker out of our pocket and make a mark any old place. Let us make a mark, and we all do make marks in life, that is a trustworthy mark that others can bet their lives on!