Well I have a new found appreciation for anyone who has ever had to service a lavatory of any aircraft. Our GV came in from London last week and it was my turn to take care of the lav. Unfortunate because the trip from London to McKinney is about 10 hours and with 4 passengers and a total of 4 crew, well enough said on that subject.

I have been hard at work training for my many duties at the hangar. I have been through a series of videos outlining fueling, fuel farm management, sexual harassment (always a corporate favorite), and to top it off fire safety. I have been training with some of the pilots as well. The avionics systems on both the Gulfstream GIV and GV are complex with a Honeywell Flight Management System, RVSM capabilities and the various auto throttles, thrust reversers, and an MDAU for maintenance techs to figure out what is going wrong with the aircraft. The MDAU helps so much whenever a discrepancy comes up. For example, the GV came back with a failure of the left ice detection system. We were able to recreate the failure on the ground and later found out what the problem was. After going through some of the checklists and flows with one of the pilots, I was allowed to observe a test flight of the GIV. To give everyone an idea of how fast these corporate jets are on takeoff roll, our V1 was 119 knots, which if anyone is flying the Cessna… that’s faster than our cruise. At 130 knots the nose was just starting to come off the ground and before you knew what was going on we were climbing through 10,000 feet. The performance on the Gulfstreams are almost beyond words, thus I can barely manage to get this down on the computer.

One of our other aircraft is currently down at the Gulfstream hanger located at Love Field in Dallas. I was able to travel down there and take a little tour of the facility where they perform some of the major component changes as well as refurbishing the interior. We hope to have the aircraft back in service later this week, but when you have a team of people taking apart your aircraft; it often never gets back the way it needs to be so we have some work cut out for us over the next few days. Stay tuned and if you have any questions for me email me at shane.bertrand@eds.com and I will try and get back to you as soon as I can.