That busted towbar near Dallas cost me 3 hours last Tuesday

Got called out to a hangar at Addison Airport last week to fix a pushback tug that was dead. Found the towbar pin had sheared clean off because some apprentice used a grade 5 bolt instead of a grade 8. I had to wait 2 hours for a parts run from the supplier down in Carrollton. Has anyone else had to deal with someone swapping hardware from the wrong bin?

3 comments

3 Comments

claire_gibson18d ago

Some apprentice used a grade 5 bolt instead of a grade 8" but honestly that sounds like a supervisor failure, not an apprentice mistake.

the_emery17d ago

That exact thing happened at a shop I used to work at in Tulsa. A green kid grabbed a bin of grade 5s because the grade 8 bin was empty and nobody told him not to. The torque spec on that flange called for grade 8 and he just went with what was in front of him. Supervisor walked by twice while he was running those bolts, said nothing, then blamed the kid when the joint failed inspection. The kid quit the next week, and honestly I don't blame him. You can't put a rookie in a high stakes job without checking their work and then act surprised when they make a mistake.

river_allen17d ago

Back in 2019 at Love Field I watched a lead mechanic grab a handful of bolts from what he thought was the grade 8 bin but it was actually a mixed bin that had gotten dumped together after a shelf collapse. He didn't check the head markings at all, just ran them into a landing gear brace. It took a fracture in a load test three weeks later to catch it. The real issue isn't just the bolt grade though. Most grade 5 and grade 8 bolts look almost identical unless you look for the radial lines on the head. A green apprentice wouldn't know to check that unless someone showed them. That falls on the trainer or the lead.