Our guys stopped at Bakersfield, California, to refuel before pushing on and got a chip light on the forward transmission. The chip detector consists of a pair of magnetized electrodes across which flows the lubricating fluid for the transmission. If enough metallic particles build up, the chip detector will trip and direct you to make sure the transmission isn’t coming apart. As you might imagine, this is a fairly big deal.
The guys pulled the chip detector and found that it was indeed full of metallic shavings. After consultation with our maintenance officer, a new transmission was ordered and shipped to the National Guard unit located at the airfield. It would take three days to arrive. Meanwhile the flight engineer and crew chief entertained themselves tearing down the old transmission in anticipation of swapping it out for the new one.
Once they got the tranny opened up, they realized that the transmission was fine. One of the hydraulic pumps bolted onto the tranny had failed. The enterprising flight crew pulled the pump, had a fresh one shipped out overnight from our unit parts supply via FedEx, and had the aircraft up and operational the day the gigantic metal can containing the new transmission arrived at Bakersfield.
The Nature of Money
The forward transmission on a CH47D helicopter cost Uncle Sam a cool
quarter million dollars back in 1993. It’s rare that you find such a trinket
just sitting around someplace. DoD photo.
What is it about money? Everybody wants it. Folks kill for it. There’s literally no limit to the lengths some will go to acquire it.
Nowadays money isn’t even real. It’s just zeroes and ones in a computer someplace. Back in the day, wealth was measured in livestock. Somebody with a thousand goats was a very rich man. If somebody tried to give me a thousand goats today, I’m not sure I’d still be their friend. What will today’s version of money seem like a century from now? Pretty silly would be my guess.
When I was an Army Aviator, each unit had a maintenance budget. If something broke on one of your helicopters you requested the part you needed and it came out of your maintenance budget. That’s fine if it’s a ten-dollar light bulb. A quarter million-dollar transmission for a CH47D helicopter is something else entirely.
One of our crews was deploying to the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California. I’ve been there a lot, and I can say without reservation that Fort Irwin is one of my least favorite places in the entire world. If misery was a mineral you mined out of the ground, Fort Irwin would be the place to find it.
The maintenance guys made a frantic call to the depot that had shipped the thing. They received assurances that we would not be charged for it. The guys blasted off for the desert, and all was right with the world.
Several months later we had an aircraft at our home station that did indeed poop its forward transmission. This was toward the end of the fiscal year, and the maintenance budget could ill afford a quarter million dollar transmission. We were all fairly disheartened. This aircraft would just sit around useless until the new budget came out. We had stuff to do with that airplane and folks who wanted to fly it. That’s when I asked myself where was the last place I had seen a spare forward transmission for a CH47D helicopter.
Al Gore had not yet invented the Internet, but I found the phone number for that Bakersfield National Guard unit easily enough. I gently asked about the big green box with “Chinook Transmission” stenciled across the side. The NCO on the other end of the phone was clearly agitated. He said they had called the phone number on the box repeatedly, gotten no response, and eventually turned it over to the California DRMO (Defense Reutilization Management Office). It seemed the California National Guard was about to auction a brand new Chinook transmission off as scrap.
I called the DRMO and caught them just in time. I asked if I showed up in two days in a big Army helicopter could I have it for free? The DRMO guys agreed and a week later that transmission was installed and operational on our dead aircraft.
A friend of mine paid $600 to cover a pair of binoculars that was lost during a change of command inventory. That’s a lot of money for a young Army Lieutenant with a family. However, the Army misplaced a quarter million-dollar Chinook transmission and apparently nobody ever noticed. It’s a funny old world.
