When I worked in the shops and even in Overhaul you only worked Monday through Friday with Saturday and Sunday off. It was a different set up in Check Crew. You would work six days and have two days off. I hated that! It felt like you had two Mondays in a week. Your days off were always different: Mon./Tues.; Tues./Wed.; Wed./Thurs.; etc.. About every five or six weeks you would end up with 4 straight days off which some mechanics thought was great. Personally I didn't like it at all. The company claimed they had to work “6&2” in order to have five working days in each pay period. The pay period ran from Sunday to Saturday. I tried to show the company and the union that you could work four days and two days off and still have five working days in a pay period, but to no avail. Too many guys liked the four days off at the end of a six-week cycle. So I had to grin and bear it! They claimed it was the fairest, but I didn't believe it.

Being a new guy in Check Crew, and also coming out of the shops, my work was mostly the dirty jobs like greasing, lubricating, opening up panels for inspection, closing panels after inspection and any other items that might come up. It really wasn't that bad of a job although some mechanics considered greasing and lubricating beneath their position. This sometimes created problems. I recall an incident where Bob Shaw gave Dave Jewell a greasing job to do and Jewell said he was sick and went home. Dave Jewell, who everybody called “Super Mechanic” because he only wanted to do the engine run-ups, flab rigging and other big jobs, didn't want to do any greasing and the next day he got the same greasing item and went home sick again. Well this was a challenge to the lead Bob Shaw. So  Bob made sure that nobody else got the grease jobs. After a few days Jewell finally did the greasing. Everybody was tickled about him doing it too. Justice was done!

There was another lead in Check Crew - Dudley Pelletier. Everyone called him “Deadly Dudley” because he had a nasty habit of going into the cockpit and operating the levers that were tagged “Do Not Move, Unit Being Worked On”. His theory was that most of the tagged units were operational and that the mechanics just didn't take the tags off and that if someone was working on a tagged system, they would yell s soon as he pushed or pulled the lever. This was not a safe or healthy practice! As a matter of fact, I was working on the nose wheel well of an FH-227 and I could hear the air surging in the lines so I jumped out of the way fast and the nose gear retracted. If I hadn't moved I would have been hit! That upset me but when I found out it was Dudley who selected the up position for the gear handle I was none too surprised! Deadly Dudley - a legend in his own time! There was one good thing about Dudley. If you asked him for help, he would almost do the whole job by himself while you watched. Or if you needed some part, he would get it for you. There was good and bad.

I’ll describe the daily routine of working in Check Crew. At 7:00 a.m. you would go over to the lead you were assigned to and he would get you an item that had to be done Routine items were things like opening or closing panels, greasing, time change items.  Non routine items like things that had to be fixed or replaced (hoses, stripped screws, worn brake linings etc.). After getting the item you would get your took box and take it over to the aircraft and then do whatever work is necessary to complete the item. After the job is done you would write on the item what you did and sign it off. You would put the item into the inspector's slot for him to approve your work. Sometimes you could get an inspector right away and sometimes they were busy and your item wouldn't get inspected for a couple of days. So you would go to the lead for another job. Some leads would give you three or four items to work, just so you wouldn't bother them all day. Others would give you one at a time. Six of one or half dozen the other! I used to like to get three or four items so I could pick the one I wanted to do. At 9:00 a.m. you would get a 12-minute break. Then a half-hour lunch at 11:00 a.m. and another 12-minute break around 1:00 p.m.. The shift ended at 3:00 p.m. and you had about ten minutes to clean up but everyone would quit a half an hour before the shift ended to put our tools away, write a turnover (when you didn't finish an item you wrote down what work you had completed on the item so the next guy would know what he had to do to finish the job) and fill out our time cards. We had to use different work order numbers for different aircraft and jobs we had to get 8 hours credited to the correct work order. The bosses would always be after us to put down the right work order numbers. Most mechanics felt if it added up to eight hours who cares! The company changed our time card system several times. It ran from written cards to finally IBM punch cards. The IBM punch cards would keep your time to the minute, but the drawback for management was that every week the foreman would get big readout sheets that showed everybody's time day by day. With a big crew like Check Crew, working rotating days off, it would be hard to keep track of which guy was working a regular day or an overtime 6th or 7th day.

This would be a good time to explain how overtime worked at Mohawk. All overtime was called by the foreman. In fact that seemed to be his primary job in Check Crew. If he made a mistake and asked a guy to work overtime who wasn't low on the overtime list, he would have to pay all of the guys who weren't asked. It was a good deal for the mechanics. There was a lot of overtime in Check Crew so the foreman was always busy calling overtime. At Mohawk, overtime was either four hours after your shift or eight hours on your sixth or seventh day. The four hour pre- or post-shift was time-and-a-half. The sixth day was also  time-and-a-half. The seventh day was double time. If you worked a holiday it was two-and-a-half times (or eight regular hours plus eight hours of time-and-a-half). The foreman asking overtime would go with the roster, low man first to be asked. The mechanics would either accept or refuse and the sheet would be marked accordingly. I recall one Friday I was asked to work a 6th day which I accepted but I felt sick the next day so I didn't come in. I called the foreman and told him that I couldn't make it for overtime. When I got my paycheck for that period I found that I got paid for eight hours of overtime. I didn't say a word to the company figuring they would eventually find out. But they never did! I found out later that in the Check Crew, because of rotating shifts and guys working a lot of overtime, it was almost impossible to keep an accurate count on the big “IBM” timecard readout sheets. So the foreman would just use the overtime lists of who accepted or who refused as the record of payroll hours. In other words if you accepted and didn't work, you still got paid for the overtime. A sweet deal if you didn't do it often! (I did it twice I recall.) Another weakness of the IBM card was that it didn't show your starting or ending times. It would just record he total hours. This left a loop hole for shop mechanics who worked a sixth day. A guy would come in early, say 4:00 a.m., and punch in himself and his buddy. Then his buddy would come in late, say 9:00 a.m., and leave at his regular time of 3:00 p.m. punching out both guys. Meanwhile the guy who came in early would leave at noon! This could only work in a shop where only two mechanics were working overtime with no foreman or leads. ( I did this a couple of times too!)

I worked in check crew for 1 ½ years and then bids opened up for the Hydraulic Shop which I bid and got - happily!