Liferafts

[biddyman]

Does or has anyone actually done the rig check before installing liferafts?

We have two airplanes that can\'t be rigged IAW the JG(probably all our planes). We suspect that the cables all remained the same and at sometime when the bottle head, conduit and cable requirements changed that it threw the rigs completely off.

Incidently, prior to actually starting the rig with the properly equiped dummy bottles installed the deploy sequence was backwards. It was:

Outbd bottle

Outbd strap

Outbd door

Inbd bottle

Inbd strap

Inbd door

[Slinnky]

Its been about awhile since I\'ve done it but recall finding some out of limits and haveing to have some local manned. Not often do you find many people that actualy check them let alone have the bottles to do it.

[biddyman]

It seems all our planes are out of tolerance. Looks like a world wide one time.

[damnpoor]

We always do the checks with the dummy bottle when we change rafts and it always checks OK.

[ec130crewchief]

I\'ve always done liferaft rigs with the dummy bottles. Most were in rig, but there were a few that were out of tolerance.

I seem to remember a bunch of TCTO\'s on the life raft system in the late 1980\'s, when we had the two or three inadvertant deployments (one of which was a bird from our unit at Kirtland). I also remember that something was done to the cables that might possibly throw the rigging off.

Another thing that just popped into my mind-the cable configuration changed model to model, and it almost seems from year to year. The job guides don\'t cover all the models, IIRC, because I had to go to the old -2 maintenance manuals to rig the liferafts on a 1968 FY model bird.

[biddyman]

Yeah, we got copies of all the TCTOs. Ended up we making custom cables for the airplanes. They were all the same, but were shorter than the sets in the -4. We have H3\'s from three different bases. (92, 93 and 94s) They were all out of rig. A couple of other bases started to look at it and found the samething.

[Guest cobra935o]

I never used the JG to do the rig check, but if you followed the TO, almost always with the dummy bottle the cables were \"supposedly\" out of rig. You were supposed to use the local manned tool to check those distances, etc. etc. I am one for using the TO/JG to do the jobs, but man doing life rafts per the TO would take you all day to just get one done.

[biddyman]

We are finding that if they are rigged by the book the sequence order is fine. If you put the cable that the -4 requires, the sequence is all out of whack.

[Guest cobra935o]

I think that was our problem, the dummy bottle cables were a lot shorter then the actual bottles used on the rafts, and when we tried to do the rig checks, it was throwing everything off. Hard to tell, I have been out of maint for a long time now. It is funny some of the things that you can remember, and things that have just been lost over the years.

Nathan