Robert E. Reed Jr.
What to do next, another cross road

After the layoff from Lycoming, I had to decide which way to direct my life.  The experience with the LT-101 product line carried some heavy baggage with it.  The engine never did mature to a venerable state of reliability like many engines do.  In fact, as I write this in 2008, the U.S. Coast Guard finally got so tired of the engine's problems that they are carrying out a fleetwide repowering program to repower all 96 Dolphins with the French Turbomeca Arriel engine.  It's the engine that originally powered the civilian version of the Dolphin, called the Dauphine.  That hurts because I spent alot of effort in a program to convince the Coast Guard to re-evaluate their engine overhaul procedures in Elizabeth City.  We demonstrated the concept and trained them to open and repair engines at each individual station to increase engine availability to the fleet.  It was very successful but it's now 18 years since we did that and that's 18 years of frustration that the Coasties had to put up with.   They need a better engine, and unfortunately it has to be a French engine that gets the job done.  I guess that's fitting since the Helicopter is also from France.

The horrible reputation of the LT-101 left me a little weary of the customer support profession.  I also had my life tied up with my home and family in Humboldt County and resisted attempts to recruit me to other large cities in aviation related positions.  Frankly, I'd had it with customer support and the negative experiences I'd had representing a failing product line.  I thought it might be interesting to get out of the "white collar" world of offices and all the rest of it.

I'd tossed around doing some consultancy work but most of my contacts wanted to associate me with the LT-101 and other Lycoming products, so I gravitated away from it.  For 9 months I worked for myself, traveling around doing work on LT101's and even a few business jets.  The risk was high, a little too high for my resources.  I did the work without insurance coverage and gave it up without ever having any engine failure issues due to my workmanship.  However, deep internal aircraft engine work seemed much too risky for my family to be exposed to.  A friend of mine was doing this same sort of thing in Hawaii, and he had an engine come apart and a helicopter was lost because if it right after he'd had the engine apart for a turbine module change.  That freaked me out a little so I looked to other directions.  In the mean time, I had a few depositions where I helped out Lycoming in customer related lawsuits on product reliability issues.  Occasionally over the next two years I went to bat for Lycoming, testifying in court proceedings and depositions against disgruntled customers.  It often involved high visibility people and companies.  All of them were settled out of court.

I considered venturing into human factors work since I was an experienced and USC certified aviation accident investigator, and am still considering work in that area to this day.  I worked at a plan for entering the market, with the target being the hands-on technicians of the industry.  The ideas came and went down on paper.  Diagrams were drawn up, but the time didn't seem right.  For one thing, I needed more computer power and I didn't have the capital to spend on it.  It was obvious at the time that computers were undergoing a drastic change and growth of power and capabilities.  As soon as money was spent for a computer station, the same money would by twice the machine 6 months later.  I decided to wait.  Then, the internet came along with better computers and I jumped in with some web sites on human factors relating to aircraft maintenance and got some pretty good response but never launched the business.


Time to get the hands dirty

So I brought my old toolbox out of it's 9 year retirement and went to work in nearby Eureka, California.  It was an unlikley professional change.  I went to work at a local Peterbilt truck dealership as a technician.  It was terribly difficult during the first year, because it wasn't all that interesting to me but I needed to make the house payments.  For 6 months I physically ached in my ligaments due to the heavy strain of heavy lifting that I hadn't done in 9 years of white collar work.  This was the time when heavy ground transport trucks were starting to be computerized with full authority digital control.  Digital engine controls meant diving into it heavy with laptops and pc's, and it started to get interesting.

Then Cummins West in Arcata, California, closed their doors in 1993.  5 of their people came to work for us at Peterbilt, and a ton of new work came with them.   They brought over their injection pump overhaul facilities and test equipment, including an injection pump test stand and an injector test stand.  A new room was built and I was asked to help the Cummins fuel technician with the impossible work load at the time. 

After a few weeks of doing this, a very strange thing happened.  One of the other techs from Cummins thought he should have been picked as the "second fuel tech" and became jealous to the extreme.  It was a faction thing.  It actually happened twice in 2 years there due to a management change, an he hated me even more the second time.  It set up a resentment issue in him that he never gave up.  After some time working in that role, I gave over the tasks to this jealous young fellow.   I'd been there and done that with that type of work when I worked at Parker Hannifin Aerospace in their Aerospace Hydraulics division in Irvine, California.  Parker Hannifin's test facilities made the Cummins injection pump room look like a janitor's closet.  That he was so upset at me for being offered the tech position was very puzzling to me and I wasn't comfortable being the target of his anger, so I just let him have the job.  It was certainly nothing worth getting worked up over as far as I was concerned, but it was extremely important to him.

One day an aviation technician for Louisiana Pacific's corporate flight department found me working at Peterbilt.  On regular occasions he brought in his Lear 35 landing gear wheel half bolts for me to Magnaflux.  We had the only Magnaflux machine in the North Coast area.  One day when I went to the local store for a newspaper, he was there buying something and he invited me to come to work part time for Louisiana Pacific to help him with inspections on their aircraft fleet.  They had a Lear 35, a Bell 206L-1 Jetranger, and a Cessna Conquest twin turboprop.  He was a great guy to work with and it was a lot of fun at a very nice large hangar facility.  Later, he offered me a full time job which I accepted.  Then as luck would have it, just prior to my hiring Lousiana Pacific closed operations in the County and left town.  The people who worked at the hangar moved up to Portland where LP's main corporate operations were.  It was a great disappointment because I was looking forward to getting back to working in aviation.

I worked there at Peterbilt for 6 years.  Cummins West had existed after their shutdown strictly as a political presence in the area, first by retaining only one technician and then they hired a guy back from our shop.  About 9 months later Cummins West wanted me to come to work for them, so I accepted and I went to work there for a bunch more money and much closer to home as well as a company truck.  This was a time when my kids were between 9 and 14, so it was very important that I be in their lives and home most of the time.  Being able to be there for their school and after school activities was priceless and worth the change in professions. 

The Cummins West job was just what I needed.  It was a leap forward to put my electronics qualifications to work on their industrial power generation work.  Cummins intensively trained me on power generation products right up to the 2 megawatt units with the big 3000 horsepower V-16 Cummins 60 litre engine.  It was good work, fun, and challenging.  I also trained and worked on the latest Cummins engines powering the trucks and boats.  It was more challenging than Peterbilt because engine work is much more intense than other areas of the business.  The job requires you to work fast and efficiently since we are in the business of selling shop time.  It's a high pressure deal for sure.

I worked at Cummins for a year when a very bad thing happened.  The jealous guy who still worked at Peterbilt  wanted to come to work for us at Cummins.  He was a very good Cummins tech with lots of knowlege about the Cummins products.  My supervisor knew he had a problem with me, so he gave me and another guy veto power to hiring the guy.  We both agreed to hire him.  I thought I could convince him that I was an okay guy, but I didn't take into account that he hated me even more for the time that Cummins approached me instead of him the first time.  That was the third strike against me in his eyes.  In another amazing stroke of unfortunate luck, after we hired him, he campaigned for the shop supervisor position and got it.  The writing was on the wall for me.  It was one of those bizarre cases where nothing I could do could make him like me, so he built a case over time against me in my personell file and one day he just came out and fired me.  I couldn't do anything about it.  I cleared out my service truck, cleaned up my stuff and walked home.  It was hard to take, but it was the best thing ever to happen as it turned out.


Peterbilt Again

After looking around the area for work outside the trucking industry, I left a note and resume on the doorstep of the same hangar where Louisiana Pacific used to be.  I knew that a corporate aircraft management firm had the hangar and they had a Hawker 125 in there owned by a local financial institution.  I got a reply, and was hired instantly to help out there and detail the airplanes.  It was enough work to keep me going and the house payments going.  It was alot of fun too.  Then, another aviation problem happened.  They sold the plane.  I worked very hard at getting it looking good.  But, we had a new plane coming that would not be here for about 90 days.  So when we sold the plane, I stopped working there until the new plane came.   Just at the time when the Hawker went away, I was hired by Peterbilt for a second time.  I was making even more money than I was at Cummins.  A few new guys I knew were now working at Peterbilt, and it was the most fun I ever had working in a shop like that, including the aircraft shops I'd worked at.  It was nothing but laughs all day long.  There were no bad apples in the group at all, a rare combination of talent.  In all, we had over 125 years of combined wrenching experience.

I worked at Peterbilt for about 18 months when I heard some interesting news.   The guy who hated me and fired me from Cummins had gotten himself into trouble at another Cummins location he moved to when he tried to take over control of it.  He found that he was not adept at managing employees, and a company consultant evaluated him on several visits, and he ended up being let go from Cummins in the end.  Specific issues I won't go into, but the ones that were known about explained why he targeted me, so I was vindicated and my reputation was completely restored.  Upper management in this large company recognized this and apparently without me knowing, recommended me for rehire. 

After 3 years at Peterbilt, I approached Cummins to go back to work for them, and they snapped me up immediately with more money again.  I went to work for them and have been there ever since.  We've moved the shop into a new location and it's a pretty nice place to work.  I'm transitioning back into Cummins Power Generation work again after being there for 2  years, so that will be fun.  I'd have to say that I've had some of my most difficult and challenging work while at Cummins this second time.  Also, this is the first time since going back into trucking in 1992 that I've been considered the most experienced technician in the shop I work in, with alot of young guys around who have much less experience than I.  The uncomfortable thing about that is that I don't have more experienced guys to fall back on for advice when something wierd comes up.  I'm it.  In actuality, advice is a phone call away back to my friends at Peterbilt.

Outside of work, I am still surfing, and I take the boat out fishing from time to time too.  It reminds me of when I was a kid.  I love being around the water.