How Having an A&P Benefitted Me Part 8

So now I was faced with a conundrum. Take the airline job or stay in physics research. On the one hand the physics job had great stability but on the other I’d be leaving behind all that experience in aviation. In the end we decided to take the airline job and we packed up and headed to Indianapolis.

The airline was ATA otherwise known as American Trans Air. It got its start as a charter vacation operator using a Boeing 707. By the time I showed up they had a whole stable of Boeing 727’s, 757’s, and Lockheed L1011’s and had entered into scheduled service operations, eventually becoming the 10th largest carrier in the U.S. before its eventual demise.

ATA hired me to help in their parts purchasing group since the department was basically brand new and knew nothing about parts or planes. The hiring manager said my A&P and my experience in Maintenance Control had won me the job. I learned about the mass terminations shortly after arriving and was told that the previous group had been discharged for taking kickbacks from parts sellers. Believe me, there are some shady people in the used aircraft parts business. But then again, we never flinched until we wrote purchase orders with six figures on them, and anytime you are talking about that much money the temptation becomes very real.

Here’s how that temptation turns into a crime. A used serviceable set of fan blades may have cost a broker $250,000 and maybe they are only really worth $350,000. But if you work a deal with the airline buyer to pay $700,000 then you make a nice profit and maybe the buyers home mortgage gets paid off. Or they get a new car, or golf clubs, or a paid vacation to Bora Bora.

During my time in that department I also discovered a local vendor who was dumpster diving and retrieving our discarded igniter plugs, bead blasting them and then selling them back to us as “overhauled” parts. The buyer for that commodity had no idea that there was no such thing as an overhauled igniter. That’s the sort of thing that happens when the people in your parts group know nothing about aircraft parts beyond part numbers. BTW – the local criminal was arrested and what he was doing was a Federal crime. He was sentenced to around 10 years IIRC.

In another instance one of our Engineers wanted to send all our 727 leading edge flap actuators out to be upgraded to a -18 standard for reliability reasons. The whole program was going to cost the airline about $5M and when I saw the order I did a little research and found out that all of ours except five were -14 and higher which already incorporated the reliability mods. The Director of Maintenance put a halt to the program thereby saving the company $5M. Shortly thereafter the Engineer called me up and cussed me out and told me in the future to mind my own business. He was just embarrassed that I had done something that he should have done in the first place. He never spoke to me again after that. Some people are funny that way.

Eventually the department manager asked me if I wanted to take a supervisor position and of course I asked about the pay. He proceeded to tell me that HR policy only allowed him to increase my pay by $100 a month because it was an internal move. Needless to say I was dumbfounded and told him that I wasn’t interested in a role that was a lot more work and responsibility and that I was only going to get $25 extra a week for. He then said, “Yeah the pay isn’t much but wouldn’t you like to have the title?” It was his turn to look dumbfounded when I told him that I didn’t care about titles. He ended up hiring someone from the outside at $15,000 a year more than what they had offered me.

After that, and turning him in for taking bribes, I decided it was time to move on and started looking for new opportunities. Just in case you are interested, I saw him in the parking lot with some suppliers loading high end brand new golf club sets into the trunk of his car following a big parts deal. Scummy guy.

As it turned out, my next job opened so many doors for both my civilian and military careers. And that will be the topic of my next submission.