USNRET Posted November 10, 2015 Author Share Posted November 10, 2015 (edited) Is corrosion to the plane a problem or is it just hosed/cleaned off somehow ? Aircraft corrosion is a MAJOR problem here as we are surrounded on three sides by salt water less than one mile away; Corpus wind off the water does not help. Add that to our mission which flies the aircraft very low over salt water and we constantly have very time consuming, expensive repairs to do. We have very recently installed a high capacity Calligan water treatment plant to do rinses after every flight and we do a total wash every 28 days. Through testing we found that the municipal water was very corrosive. To answer your question A fresh water rinse of the aircraft was immediately applied including a detergent and fresh (Culligan) wash of the engines internals; run a jet while injesting fresh water. A full aircraft wash was done the next day. There was an electrician working inside the aircraft at the time of the incident and he took immediate action to close all the doors and hatches which precluded having interior structure and avionics (radios, computers, sensors, displays, radar, flight instruments, etc. destroyed). After the first, immediate reclamation of the involved aircraft took place we turned to the tooling, tool boxes, lockers of consumables (sand paper, paint masks, strainers...on and on), fans, pumps..... Hundreds of feet of air hoses and their reels (will not operate due to clogging) and the hoses will fail due to exposure. Your tax dollars at work. An example, the test bench shown below is used to proof test hoses that we build. Before we convinced the government that it would be advantageous to buy this we were spending $500 to have each line we built tested and CERTIFIED to aircraft specs. The cost of the test bench was $9000.00 or the cost of 18 hoses. We put in service about one year ago and now due to to foam spill it will cost darn near as much to get it re-certified as it would to buy a new one. Edited November 10, 2015 by USNRET Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wvu80 Posted November 10, 2015 Share Posted November 10, 2015 (edited) Well, at least nobody got set on fire... +++ (inappropriate humor too soon? ) You'd almost have to laugh, or you'd cry. Edited November 10, 2015 by wvu80 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolfbane Posted November 10, 2015 Share Posted November 10, 2015 Reminds me of a snowfall, except you can't just shovel it away. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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