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    A Day in the Life of an Aviation Electrician's Mate

    HSC4

    Photo By Petty Officer 2nd Class Sarah E Horne | 170708-N-EJ625-014CORONADO, California (July 8, 2017) – Aviation Electrician’s...... read more read more

    Grease mixes in to the salty sweat that rolls down her arms as she wrestles with the cyclic stick, a vital steering component in an MH-60 Sea Hawk. She curses loudly at the device, twisting and turning it in different directions to get a better look at how she needs to maneuver it into place. The nuts and bolts are wrenched into submission with many subtle yet vital tweaks. When the cyclic stick is finally in place, she wipes her now filthy hands on her coveralls, signifying a job well done.
    Aviation Electrician’s Mate 2nd Class Marianne De Silva is one of the many hard working Sailors assigned to Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 4 (HSC-4). Recently part of the USS Carl Vinson (CVN 70) carrier strike group, De Silva spent many hours sweating in the massive hangar bay, preparing the Sea Hawks for search and rescue and cargo loading missions.
    “Filthy, absolutely filthy,” De Silva began, describing her day-to-day job. “I have the grossest coveralls in the world and I love ‘em because number one: it shows that I work; number two: they’re a lot more flexible.”
    De Silva is part of the 15 percent of military members in the United States that are female, according to defense.gov. She considers this to be one of her more defining characteristics in a job generally considered to be masculine, creating a sense of pride while wearing some of the grimiest coveralls on the ship.
    “I want to make sure that the people in my chain of command look at me as ‘that girl’s a worker, get her out there, she clearly knows what she’s doing. Look at her, she’s filthy’” she said. “That’s a big thing in the aviation world, and all the real working maintenance type rates: how dirty you are at the end of the day.” Though she had presently worn the iconic blue digital patterned uniform, she mimicked how, while working, she would wipe her hands across her coveralls smearing the grease.
    She said that sometimes she has fun, enjoying the messy yet instantly rewarding work of making something broken whole again, but other times she feels the need to scream at the top of her lungs, as she often does when replacing a cyclic stick.
    Despite these challenges, being in the Navy has provided her adventure as she travels the world fixing and preparing aircraft to conduct the Navy’s mission anywhere, anytime.
    “We had to go to Osan, South Korea,” she recalled a time when she had been called across the Pacific Ocean to rescue a downed aircraft. “One of our helicopters had gone down for a chip indication on their engine, which basically shows you if the engine is shredding itself from the inside. A piece of metal will complete a circuit on a chip detector and will give an indication in the cockpit saying ‘chip detected’. Our pilots didn’t want to risk anything so they landed that night and [we flew over] to Osan to check it out and make sure the engine was indeed fine. I changed out the chip detector, we spun it up a couple of times as per procedure, and everything worked out okay; so we were able to go home in the morning.”
    She considers the job to be a bit gratifying knowing that something as little as changing a part can help fix an approximately twenty-million-dollar aircraft. She often sees how every little part keeps the engine running and the aircraft up in the skies where it belongs.
    Just like the nuts and bolts De Silva jealously preserves, each Sailor makes up the whole of the machine. Every Sailor has a job that needs to get done to help the shipmate next to them, exactly like the moving parts of an engine. De Silva, like other airdales like her, helps to keep the engine oiled and running by always being ready to fix and maintain aircraft; anywhere, anytime.

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    NEWS INFO

    Date Taken: 07.09.2017
    Date Posted: 07.09.2017 18:23
    Story ID: 240563
    Location: CORONADO, CA, US

    Web Views: 241
    Downloads: 0

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