Training Tip: Saved by the lineman

Heroics aren’t always part of a line tech’s job, but you can learn a lot about aircraft—and pilots—when preheating, towing, fueling, marshaling, and securing aircraft as a member of the line staff at your local airport. I’d encourage any student pilot to take the opportunity, if one should arise.

You may not think of being captain of your fixed-base operation’s fuel truck as a professional networking opportunity, but you never know. Along with providing good line service, which pilots appreciate and remember, may come invitations to ride along or even catch some left-seat time in one of the local dream machines.

Line work sometimes puts discount flight training within reach or provides some quality time haunting the company mechanics as they perform maintenance on local aircraft. A couple years from now, you may recognize the flight instructor who is giving you your first flight review as the line person who chocked your wheels and congratulated you on your first solo long ago. Perhaps you will be a CFI by then, too.

Long after a former line tech drove a tug and pumped gas at our local airport, he still inquires after certain aircraft as if they were old friends, and he lamented the loss of one particular trainer along with the rest of us when news reached him via Facebook of the hard landing that ended its career. That ex-lineman, now a major airline captain, hasn’t forgotten how his first aviation job on the line helped launch a flourishing career.

As for occasional heroics: The scenario involving the Cessna 206 pilot and an oil dipstick was described in a report to the Aviation Safety Reporting System. The reason it never became an engine-failure report after the pilot spilled some oil while adding it to the aircraft and forgot to reinstall the dipstick during the cleanup, was an eagle-eyed line staffer.

“A few minutes after contacting departure they said a lineman found the dipstick on the ramp,” the pilot wrote. The pilot was cleared to return and landed normally, noting in the report that in the future a good idea would be to “keep a rag handy” and put the dipstick someplace it wouldn’t be forgotten because of a distraction.