On Thu, 25 Dec 2003 05:37:40 GMT, "Dudley Henriques"
wrote:

It's amazing what gets down inside an airplane isn't it? In the old AT6, if
you were giving dual and either the guy in front forgot and left the canopy
cracked open, or you forgot to tell him to close it, on takeoff, every bit
of junk that had accumulated under the floor rails was sucked up and blasted
you in the face :-)

Back in the dim recesses of time when we were flying the F-8 DFBW, we
had some Navy pilots come fly it as guest pilots. They uniformly
remarked in the post-flight on how clean the airplane was; they'd
rolled inverted and nothing had fallen onto the canopy. Apparently
operational planes get a little cluttered. Or maybe a lot cluttered,
according to stories I've heard.

Our ground crews would laugh and the project test pilot would say that
the guys didn't let the pilots make a mess. The cockpits were really
clean. I remember one of the mechanics stopping by to give one of the
pilots the crystal from his watch, which he'd lost the day before.

We used to yank the inspection plates once in a while just to see what the
hell was in those dark foreboding places :-) It was sort of like when you
take the cushions off your old stuffed couch and find all sorts of goodies
buried in there.....loose change.......old stale popcorn........that blue
sock you lost five years ago.......and of course a stuffed animal or two!!!!

When I worked at McAir on the F-15, we had a snake find its way into a
cockpit and take a flight. I have always suspected that snake of
having help. (There was another snake that was flown deliberately, by
the way.) However, the kitten in the Navy trainer managed all by
itself, according to the article in last month's Approach.

Let's see if I can produce a reference:
http://www.safetycenter.navy.mil/media/approach/issues/feb03/feline.htm

Mary

--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer