PS Magazine - TB 43-PS-570
PS, The Preventative Maintenance Monthly
ISSUE 570
MAY 2000
perators, is your time worth $19,000 a minute? $95,000 a minute? How
about $4,500,000 a minute? How about a life?
Most checks in your before-operation inspection take no more than a minute
of your time. But if you miss just one of those checks, that minute can be
mighty expensive.
Say you’re operating a small emplacement excavator (SEE) and you forget to
check the engine’s oil level. Or you assume it must be OK because it was full
yesterday.
But your assumption is wrong, very wrong. The SEE developed an oil leak
and all of the oil leaked out overnight. You throw a rod—the engine’s shot.
..more
than $19,000 down the drain!
Or you take off in an FMTV 2
1
/
2
-ton truck without letting the central tire
inflation system (CTIS) stabilize at a selected tire pressure. Or you see that the
system’s electronic control unit (ECU) is unhooked, but you don’t report it.
With low tires, you make a quick turn down a steep hill and the vehicle rolls
over. If you’re lucky, you stumble out of the truck only to look at a pile of junk—
smoking ’n’ steaming to the tune of about $95,000.
The stakes are
really
high when you’re crewing a Black Hawk. Around
$4,500,000 in hardware. Anywhere from 3 to 12 lives—including yours.
So the only thing you miss in your pre-flight check is a bum hookup in a fuel
line quick-disconnect. That’s enough. You can’t put a price tag on a life.
So ask yourself, “Is the minute I save worth $19,000, $95,000 or $4,500,000.
..or
the lives of others—or my own?”
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