 We have your microphones off. We are recording. And here we go. Welcome to Meet the Experts. Again, my name is Tim Barnes. And I'm a science educator at the National Center for Atmospheric Research here in Boulder, Colorado. And I'm here with my colleague, Andrew Green, who is a mechanic with an aircraft mechanic with NCAR. And we're coming to you. I'm coming to you from my home. And I think Andrew's coming to you right from the. Right from work. You're right from work, yeah. But I'm still working. And he's just finished working. He's going to share with you some of what he does. And every other Thursday, we do this. We meet with someone who works at NCAR and learn about their jobs and what they do and answer questions from those of you who are joining us. Just so keep in mind, one really cool part about working at a place like NCAR is that there are so many different types of jobs, like a scientist, engineer, electrician, computer programmer, safety expert, machinist, mechanic, and all these different jobs more help support our scientific research. And with all those words, now I'm going to turn it over to Andrew, who's going to tell you about what he does and we'll take your questions in the chat. OK, go ahead and share my screen here. OK. Is that working? Yes. Awesome. OK, so my name is Andrew Green. I am an aircraft mechanic with NCAR. And I'm going to do a little presentation here about what I do and what NCAR does. So my presentation, those magnificent mechanics and their flying machines was kind of taken from an old 1960s movie. I'm trying to get my PowerPoint to work here. OK, there we go. So there we go. So yeah, that's me and one of my coworkers were actually installing a propeller on the C-130. We had to send those off a while back and got all four of them back this last winter. So I really can't talk about being a mechanic without first talking a little bit about the history of aircraft mechanics. So we're going to start with this guy, Charles Taylor. He was the Wright Brothers mechanic and actually built one of the first engines used on an airplane. And this is an actual quote from him. I always wanted to learn to fly it, but I never did. The Wrights refused to teach me and tried to discourage the idea. They said they needed me in the shop to service their machines. And if I learned to fly, I'd be gating him out the country, maybe becoming an exhibition pilot and they'd never see me again. So he was very valuable to the Wright Brothers. He helped run their bicycle shop. He maintained the bicycles. He actually helped build some of the sheds the Wright Brothers were using for their experiments. And yeah, he ended up fabricating the first aircraft engine when the Wright Brothers realized that they could just buy an engine that had the power they needed and the weight. They asked him to build it off some pretty crude drawings and he built it in just six weeks. The Wright Brothers needed eight horsepower to get their machine to fly and his engine produced 12 after never building an engine before. And in aviation, he is honored as in the Charles Taylor Award where you have to have 30 years minimum as a certified aircraft mechanic and 50 years in aviation. So yeah, I've met three of those guys so far and they have forgotten more than I will probably learn. So here's an expert about becoming a mechanic, what it takes, basic mechanic skills and knowledge of tooling. So knowing what ratchets are, knowing what wrenches are, close end box end, 12.5 point sheet metal, all that stuff. And then to get your airframe and power plant license which is really what you need, you need to pass a written in oral exam and in written oral and practical exam. So for the OMP, the oral and practical, you're with an administrator from the FAA and they will give you a giant manual and like a kind of beat up airplane and they will give you tasks from there and you have to go through the manual, show that you know where to find stuff and how to work on it properly. And yeah, they do a lot of questions or you can work as a repairman under an AMP to get that kind of skills, to get the knowledge to pass the OMP or you could go to a trade school, such as a Spartan and there's a couple of other in the country, not entirely sure how sparse. I think there's like one in Vegas and one in Florida and Tulsa, Oklahoma too. And math reading skills, this is really, really important. For math, I worked at a propeller shop for a while where we overhauled aircraft propellers and we would be dealing with tolerances that were like thousands of the thousands of an inch and that could completely scrap a propeller if it's not within those kind of tolerances. And reading skills too, some of the manuals can be written. Some of the manuals are kind of hard to decipher sometimes. When I worked at Great Lakes Airlines, we had Embriers, which was an airplane built in Brazil. So the manual was written in Portuguese and then translated directly over to English. So some stuff can kind of get lost in translation. So once again, those are really important skills to have. So here's what we do. Here are the two planes that I get to help maintain and are super excited to work on. We have a C-130, which was an old military transport or cargo aircraft. These are some of the stats we have on both our aircraft. We've got a C-130 and a G-5. So the C-130, she will fly up to about 27,000 feet. So not terribly high, that's still about 2,000 feet below Mount Everest. She has a capacity of 13,000 pounds, which is actually one African bull elephant who put that up the other day. And she's got a range of 2,900 nautical miles. So even though she doesn't go that far, that's almost across the United States. She can stay a lot for 10 hours and hold all that 13,000 pounds of scientific equipment and scientists. And to be up in the air for 10 hours, you can get a lot of data from a lot of storm systems with this airplane. And our G-5 on the other hand is obviously a lot opposite. She has a maximum altitude of 51,000 feet, which puts her at the lower end of the stratosphere. And I'm sure scientists could probably help me out, explain this better. But at that altitude, about 90% of the atmosphere of Earth's atmosphere is below the plane. So if you look out the top, you can usually see stars. So it's really good for high altitude observations and learning about weather. Capacity 5,600 pounds, which is about a really heavy SUV, basically about one GMC, Yukon Denali. But the other incredible thing is that she's got a range of 7,000 miles. So to give you an example, that would be Anchorage to Hawaii or like Tipa, Florida to Seattle with fuel to spare. So she's got great legs on her. But I, you know, range, I should say, great range, refer to range as legs sometimes, as you know, legs of flight. I digress. Anyway, let's say I listed two aircraft we have. And then this is what I do on my daily, during the day. Very first thing we do is we make sure all aircraft are safe and airworthy. What that means is every mechanic has a different kind of mantra when we're fixing something on the airplane, say we're doing fuel nozzles or maybe replacing a tire. Before we go sign off the logbook, we ask ourselves is, one, would I accept a risk to fly this airplane with what I've just fixed on it? And two, would I put somebody else I really care about on this plane? So like, you know, would I put my wife on it? Would I put my dog on it? Grandma, kids, that sort of thing. So every mechanic has a different kind of mantra on that. We complete scheduled maintenance and inspections. There's always something to do on these airplanes. So it'd be like, you know, inspecting, you know, control surfaces, replacing filters, all sorts of stuff. As a mechanic, we also conduct all the ground operations. So pulling it in and out of the hangars for the scientists and for engine runs and to do calibrations. We have to tow the aircraft in and out, which is kind of scary because I'm still learning that. And, you know, these are millions of millions of dollars worth of aircraft and you don't wanna like bump them into a part of the hangar. So there's that. We secure the aircraft after flight. We'll talk to the pilots when they get back and see if they had any warning lights come up or if something was a little funny and then we'll go take a look at that. Another big part is documentation. I actually cannot put a wrench onto the airplane at any point unless I have the proper documentation saying I can get into it. And even afterwards when I'm done fixing it, I have to have somebody else come in, look at the work and make sure I didn't leave anything in there and that everything was done safely. And then finally, when all that is said and done, we can assist the techs and scientists and inspect all the different scientific instruments we have. So yeah, it will be, sometimes they need GPS signals and you can only do that outside. So we'll tow the airplane out for the techs and scientists. Once the plane is ready to fly after the scientists have all of their instrumentation on board, the techs will go through it, make sure everything is secure on that and then we'll go through it for a final double check and make sure that their experiments are bolted down correctly because sometimes the scientists will have like high pressure gases, sometimes lethal gases, they'll have lasers, they'll have telescopes and we wanna make sure all that's like not gonna rattle around if we hit turbulence or takeoff and landing. So Andrew, it sounds like a lot, there's a lot of safety considerations when you're just working on the plane. And then- Yeah, yeah, safety is so huge. We usually are, when it comes to like doing like a, say like hydraulic filter, we're replacing those long before they go bad. So we're trying to find things before they break a lot. It's, yeah, it's a lot, a lot to it. And another thing too is that these airplanes operate in such extreme environments, if your car breaks down, you can hobble it to the side of the road, but if your engine breaks down on an airplane, you can't really, you know, pull over onto a cloud or anything, you gotta find a place to land. So, yep, and that is it for my quick presentation. Awesome, well, we are, all right, everyone, and we can, if you, yeah, you wanna leave that slide up, that's great, we'll wait and let people load in their questions in our, in the chat again. And we do have people from lots of different places. Well, a gentleman joining us from BES, an electrical consulting business focused on electrical mechanical design work. So, well, interest from a lot of areas. Oh, and there was just actually a question from him. He just wonders, do you have to perform airframes, inspections for fatigue damage, especially on the Hercules after rough flight? Yeah, we do. Luckily, I don't think we get the Herc error. We do, I had to go back. Yeah, if, so one thing that I haven't had to do it yet, but if say the airplane goes up and then lands when it's fully loaded, you can definitely cause damage to the structure. And there's other 80s going around. Like I think last week, you know, a couple of months ago, I had to do an inspection around the wing roots. Cause over time, these Hercules get old, they can find fractures around there. So yeah, there's always a lot of airframe inspections going on too. And same with on top of the wing, we've got dry bays for all the fuel tanks are. And I had to dive in there. When I first got hired here, that was one of my first jobs was going into those dry bays and inspecting all the stringers and all of the, like, you know, all the parts of the structure that really support all the weight. Could you point out where that, do you think you could point that out on one of the other photos where the dry bays are in the top of the wing? Yeah, they're on top of the wings right here. It's, I don't know if I got a better picture of it. I think the first picture of the Hercules might have. But wait, here we go. That's a better one. Yeah, the dry bays, there's five of them on top of the wings up here. I don't know if you can see the cursor. Yes, we can see it. Yeah, so there's five dry bays up on here. So we can get up through the hatch, walk along the fuselage, and then the dry bays are also connected to the fuel tanks. So if you have a problem with the fuel tank, you have to dive into the dry bay, dump out all the fuel, and then like undo another hatch that's all sealed up, and then you can go actually into the fuel tank. All right, when the questions are rolling in, so I'll get on to the next one. And this is the first one is, how long have you been working as an airplane mechanic and the same person wants to know, does your organization explore space as well? Oh, that is a good question. So I've been a mechanic for about seven years now. I started in the Coast Guard and then went to Redstone, which is now Spartan to get my A&P license. And then I've gone from different jobs here and there. Like I started off at Great Lakes Airlines and then went to a prop shop and then a corporate jet charter. So yeah, I've learned a lot about that. I'm very fortunate to land this job because now we only have two planes to work on. And then exploring space, that's a good question. I know we will do work with NASA and we will do upper atmospheric research. One of them, I'm sure the scientists could probably explain it better to me, but I know we had one experiment where we had like two lasers coming out of the top of the G5 and then they intersected at a certain point and a telescope underneath was reading all the temperatures for like six kilometers above it. So we do high atmosphere as well. I don't think we do like super power spacey stuff, but yeah. Wow, that's exciting. Are you ready for the next question? Yep. Okay, here it is. If your plane breaks down when you're in the middle of the... What do you do? I guess that's what... What if your plane breaks down when you're in the middle of the ocean or flying over the ocean? Luckily, you've got plenty of contingency plans. So say like your engine stops, the pilots all have different ways of restarting the engine, different things to go through. And yeah, like there was a lot of things you can do. If the engine's completely stall out and spotter out, the airplane just becomes a glider anyway. And so you have a long time to really figure out, like if you're up at altitude, you have a long time to figure out like where you need to land to, what airports are closer. If it is worst case scenario and you do have to touch down in the ocean or something, there's life jackets, there's life vests, there's sensors in the back of the plane that will alert national search and rescue or national search and rescue organizations where they are. There's a lot that you can do to stay safe with all that. And like I said, there's different ways of restarting the engines and it's really rare for you to lose both engines. And on the C-130, you've got four. Can it fly with just one engine? Is that even a thing? Yeah, actually, I don't know. I know like the C-130, I think can maintain altitude with just one engine. So if you lose like three engines or having a really bad day, but you should be able to stay aloft and at least stay at a good altitude until you can get to another airport. If you wanna look up a good story on that, there was a 747 back in the 80s that flew through a volcanic dust cloud. And all the volcanic dust didn't show up on the radar because it was too fine. And when it was hitting the aircraft, it was causing a lot of static electricity. So the whole plane had a weird blue lightning thing going on and the dust ended up choking out all four engines. The pilots thought they were gonna have to ditch onto the ocean. And then when they got low enough, the engines cooled, all the dust inside the engines broke apart and they were actually able to get three of the engines back up and running and make it back. So yeah, like these engines can really take a beating. Wow, that's impressive. Well, that's funny. So, and the next question is what's the hardest thing you've worked on? Ooh, hardest thing I've worked on. That is a good question. I think one of the hardest things I had to work on was I, at one of my old jobs I had, when I was at the private jet charter, we had an airplane that broke down in Sun Valley, Idaho and they sent me out there to fix it. And yeah, that was like four days of 13 hours of swapping parts out, resoldering some wires that had come undone because it was an older plane and just trying to get the engine restarted, basically. And yeah, that was definitely a rough time because it was just me and just by myself out in the cold of Sun Valley, Idaho. Nice. Okay, well then, so our next question then, what is your favorite, what are your favorite things about working at NCAR and what is your favorite part of being an aircraft mechanic? Oh, NCAR, I love this organization because we're helping expand science. Like I'm already a science nerd too, so we're learning more about our atmosphere, we're learning more about, you know, what kind of pollution, what pollution does the atmosphere? Yeah, it's just an incredible place to work at and these aircraft we work on, I love working on them because they're just so unique and one-off that, you know, they've been so heavily modified. It's kind of crazy taking them apart and actually seeing like all the different computers we have and all the different science experiments that can go on them. And just to be a part of, you know, a scientific organization is pretty amazing. And that, does that include the other answer like your favorite part of being an aircraft mechanic? Yeah. And being able to, you know, it's pretty cool to work on these aircraft and like, you know, when I first got hired here, we had to put new propellers on the C-130. She was kind of a little bit behind in some of the inspections. And so to spend so much time working on her and to get her up and running and flying again was an incredibly rewarding experience, especially a plane that big to see it go down the runway and knowing that you're the one who helped get it up and running with, you know, obviously with all the other coworkers to get it up and running and up airborne was just a really, really cool experience. Awesome. So our next question coming in is, have you ever had to land somewhere other than an airport? And if so, where? Luckily, I have not. We're not like, it's really, really, really rare for airplanes to have to land somewhere else. I think I saw a statistic like, you're much more likely to get hit by lightning than to have a problem on an airliner. Yeah, like they are incredibly safe, yeah. All right, so our next question coming in is, do you ever get to work on any of the science instruments on the aircraft? And I think this question is kind of like, is that your job or is there other people to do that? There's other people that do that. The texts that we work with, they get to work and put the science equipment in and out. I get to read about them and I get to check them out and I get to make sure that they're safe. I would love to get to that point of figuring out how the science instruments work and that sort of thing because it's just fascinating to me what they can do with some of those instruments. Actually, a great example, I was actually talking with one of our scientists the other day and she has a spectrometer that she's very fond of using that will use light waves to, or use a spectrum of light to figure out what chemistry is going through the atmosphere. Wow, this is really cool. Okay. Yeah, and if anybody is interested, I was gonna do this at the end, but I'll do that right now because someone asked, we have a Meet the Experts with one of the other, one of our software engineer who works at the aviation facility, Janina Kino, and she did a Meet the Experts called Not Your Average Aircraft, a mobile laboratory for weather research. So please make your way over back to the Meet the Experts site and you can watch some of those instruments working in on the aircraft. And we'll wait a couple of seconds if we get any more questions. And while we're waiting to see if we get any others who any questions coming in, I was curious, is there a, is, do you have a lot of travel? Is there travel involved with your job? Is that just part of it? Yeah, with COVID going on and all that, we haven't really been able to travel, but again, aviation internally, yeah, there's a lot of travel. Our company, NCAR, we send these aircrafts all over the globe. The G5 a couple of years back went down to Antarctica and actually popped over the top of Antarctica, getting research done. C-130 has been all over the globe too. And from what I hear, C-130 is actually pretty well known through the science community around the world, especially with having that giant snowflake on the tail. There are people know who she is. They know snowflake. Well, even it's funny, thanks for that answer and a whole three questions came in while you were answering it. And let's see, I think they're kind of related. What is your favorite plane that you've ever worked on? Start there. Oh, favorite plane. I am really liking that C-130. The reason why I like it so much is it's so big. It has so much power, but everything is so easy to get to. It started off life as a military airplane. And so they don't have any need for like creature comforts. So there's no real interior. So if I need to get to a hydraulic pump, it's like right there on the wall. Or if I need to get to a hydraulic reservoir, it's also right there on the wall. I don't have to crawl into like tight compartments or maintenance bays and, you know, maneuver and pretzel my way around to get to components. I really, really like how simple they kept that plane. That's excellent, excellent. And there are two questions that are similar about your favorite project or either and what project you're looking forward to. And so is there, do you have any favorites that you don't? So I'm still pretty new here. So I haven't had a chance to travel yet, but I'm excited for this upcoming summer because I think the C-130 is supposed to go down to Houston. And then the G-5 is supposed to go over into the Pacific. So either like Okinawa or South Korea and the G-5 is supposed to study them on Soons out there. So I'm really, really hoping I can get on maybe the G-5 project, but we'll see. Yeah, our planes go all over the globe now. And yeah, it's exciting. Just all the places they go. I'm really excited to be traveling more with them. Oh my gosh, that's awesome. And we are just about at time. So I know that one of our visitors has said that they needed to log off. And before we do that, I'm right now cutting and I think the URL for our survey. So I'm gonna put that right into our chat for people who have a chance to help us out for the survey. Is there anything, and before we do end up, is there, I'm looking for the last questions, is there anything you'd like to share with everyone before we do conclude for the day? That's a really good question. Yeah, I'd say stay in school. Yeah, no, focus on math and reading if you wanna have a really cool job like what I have. Yeah, focus on math and reading, stay in school, science is incredible. I am so fortunate to have this job because one of the benefits is they have tuition assistance. So I am myself actually going back to college right now for geology. So I'm also sitting with scientists and it's kind of cool learning the lingo and the language of science and being able to talk to the scientists around here. So yeah, really keep up the reading and math skills. That's awesome. Our visitor, Mr. McWilliam says he can second your statement. He has an engineering degree and it was, is that 100,000% worth the work? So definitely a good opportunity. And I do, I just forget that someone asked, is NCAR hiring mechanics right now? Do you know if there's any position? There is talk that maybe after the beginning of the year, we might. Like I said, we're waiting for everything to pick back up. Yep. Absolutely, I understand that. All right. Well, everybody, we are finished with the presentation. So, and I see lots of thank yous. People loved your, loved the presentation. Yep. One more thing. If you are looking for a job, just check out the NCAR website because I do post all sorts of jobs that we're looking for. Yep. Thank you, I feel good to put up that piece. And for everyone I did post in the, for the 55012, if anybody is still hanging on there, I did post the URL. I can put it in there one more time for everyone. And just to reiterate, we are doing meet the experts every other Thursday, but we'll skip over Thanksgiving. So hopefully you can join us again in the next session. We'll be on December 3rd at 1pm. So the next meet the experts session after this one will be on December 3rd at 1pm. And we'll chat with the scientists who studies changes in polar sea ice. I'll share the link to our meet the experts page where you can find the details upcoming. And with that, I'd like to say thanks for joining everybody. And let me get that URL in there. And once I get that in there, we'll see you all next time. Cool. Let me see if you're gonna not share this. Okay. I'm gonna go ahead and stop the recording.