My time working on the A-10 was not all roses, however.
There are now sheet metal canopies over the parked planes, but when I worked on them we were out in the full sunlight. Summer afternoons in Tucson on a concrete flightline could get extremely hot. I don't recall too much trouble as a young lad, but we were permitted to take our heavy canvas fatigue shirts off and work in white T-shirts. Most of my time was spent on mid shift (night time), so, heat wasn't too big of an issue.
We had 3 shifts: days(8AM to 4PM), swings (4PM to 12PM) and mids (12PM to 8AM). I worked all 3, swings was the worst. Days was the coveted shift, but then you had all the high up NCO's and officers walking around looking for ways to bust you and advance themselves. Very rarely did we do night flying, so, officers during mid shift were rare. So I gravitated to mid shift. We got a new hotshot master seargent on swing shift my last year and a half there, and he worked them to the bone. He wouldn't let people go if we had a maintenance problem, keeping them after midnight just to make himself look good. Mids is when we did the plane loading, so having the entire swing shift crews there made it tough to get our job done. And if we didn't get all the right planes properly loaded on time, we hung for it - the excuse of having the other guys in the way didn't fly.
There was one of the 3 squadrons who just seemed to always be having problems (not mine). One time they were loading the gun, and had to have full electric power and hydraulic pressure to do that. The guy in the cockpit was playing "Star Wars" while he was bored, and pulled the trigger. The gun operated as advertised, shooting off 4 or 5 rounds. Almost put the plane on it's rear end! Luckily it was on the front row, so the rounds went harmlessly into the desert. Had it been in the 2nd or 3rd rows the whole dang flightline could have gone up like domino's
Another time they were doing a check on the gun, again all power applied. The gun has a safety feature in that - once you're done firing - the gun automatically backed up so the it is never loaded until you're actually firing it. (So there's actually a time lag when you pull the trigger, but as I've said before the thing spins so fast it's not noticeable). Well, as part of the maintenance checks, one of the guys underneath has to insert a test plug into the sensor to simulate to the computer that the gun has backed up and is empty. And to do that he has to jam his hand in behind the gear to click it in. Unbeknowst to him, they were out of sequence, so, once he popped in the plug the gun rotated - and took 4 of his fingers off! They put them on ice and rushed him to the hospital, and they sewed them back on. He then served as a loading instructor, the nicest guy, never said anything bad about the other guys who screwed up. After that incident they came up with a remote plug on the end of an aluminum rod so a guy didn't have to stick his hand in there.
We also had the unenviable task of washing the plane. After so many flight hours a plane was hauled over to the "wash rack" and every body took turns doing it. Picture a huge uncovered car wash - with no pressure washer! Usually there were solitary guys available to go over there. They were short a man on their crew, someone was away on vacation, certifications were expired, etc, so those poor guys had the cleaning duty. But the higher up used the wash rack as discipline. If they didn't like you, you'd get sent over there alot. In a way it wasn't too bad - if you worked fast and got the thing clean and it passed inspection you could go home early. (Although if they were behind and you got done soon enough they brought a second plane in. Dang!) Crew chiefs cleaned all the top of the airplane (they didn't want us grunts stepping on the wrong panel), so the underside was our task. Usually two guys split the duty, though occasionally only one of us was there, and the crew chief would try and help you out but he kinda had his hands full.
The 3 wheel wells were especially sick. Those areas were virtually impervious to the weak soap they made us use, and we had to clean all around the electrical connectors and hydraulic lines with various brushes and rags. It had to be spotless. Try as you might you'd get filthy, and more than once while rinsing the internals with a fire house type of rig it'd come straight back at you and you'd get a face full. I don't know what was in the soap but it tasted bad! Probably some carcinogen. At least with the A-10 it was high enough off the ground where you could almost stand up under it to clean. Fighters like the F-4 I heard were absolutely a horror to clean, as you'd be crawling or laying under it.
