My job in the Navy, and now in retirement, is to track aircraft inspections and forced removal components to make sure nothing flies beyond its allowable limit. Normally the job is pretty easy, although it is stressful, as critical mistakes can result in loss of aircraft and aircrew. We have in our possession some Bell Jet Rangers, a pretty common civilian use helicopter. The Hub Assembly, which holds the blades onto the helicopter, has an inspection that needs to be completed every 1200 flight hours. There is a note, however that says that the inspection is only applicable to Hubs with a Part Number of 206-011-100-127 and subsequent. We have a Hub with a Part Number of 206-011-100-107. Last I checked, subsequent means after, and a -107 would not come after a -127. But no, not if you are Bell Helicopter. I received the following e-mail today from Bell:
WHAT THE EVER-LOVING GOD DAMN FUCK? In most cases 127 comes after 107, but in this case we will arbitrarily start counting over so as to really increase the chance that there will be catastrophic damage due to a missed inspection. These are people’s lives we are playing with, manuals should be absolutely clear, with no chance of misinterpretation, unless you are Bell Helicopter. They can just do whatever the fuck they want…
Are you sure it’s not that he can’t keep his Johnson rod out of “it”? That seems like it could be a bad situation when dealing with helicopters.
OP, screw Bell and their inane numbering system.
I can ask a friend of mine, a senior engineer at Bell, but I’m 99% certain I know what happened here. A few years ago Bell converted their systems over to SAP. When you do a conversion you can(in theory) import your current numbers and SAP will just pick up where you left off and continue in sequence, but sometimes if something doesn’t convert right you may end up out of sequence. So Bell may have had records for the past 127 iterations of this part number and tried to convert them over into SAP, but a few of them had incomplete data records(from SAP’s point of view) so only 106 of them actually converted and when the record for the next version of that part was created, instead of being 128, it became 107.
The old numbers are not the numbers of record anymore, they’re some extraneous field called “legacy part number” or something like that, and odds are that in the SAP system what you call 127 is actually called 106 with a “additional part number” field of “127.” That’s why when you call Bell you can say “I have a part 127” and they can pull it up. It comes up on their screen as “part 106, legacy part number 127.”
We went through something similar at Boeing a few years ago when we converted a lot of our materials from our legacy material management systems to SAP. A lot of our ancient part numbers, from planes that have been out of production or even maintenance for fifty years or more had missing data fields(from a modern data record point of view) that we had no way of backfilling because those parts essentially don’t exist anymore. If someone called us up to order one we’d say “we need a year of lead time and we can get you that part” and then we’d contact several manufacturers and see who was wiling to make the part for a special order.
This is a paperwork thing and doesn’t reflect on the quality of the part, or the engineer’s ability to count. It’s just that the system of record now uses a slightly different numbering sequence than the old system of record did.
Don’t touch the Johnson bar! It’ll explode the fuel casing! And if the Wilson-Smith indicator gets above one sixty, just turn that little nut down there one quarter turn. There’s a little screwdriver there, just put it in and turn it one quarter.
It reflects on the potential hazard that the OP is describing. Explaining that this happened because they were using shitty software may be informative but it is no excuse.
While you haven’t described the precise details of why old data records could not be imported into a new system, if that is indeed the issue – and I’m sure the details are complex – it’s pretty obvious that this is not an intrinsic problem but rather a software or database functional limitation. And it might even be one that just isn’t worth the effort of resolving, but in most cases it means that the organization should be using better systems and certain overpaid software hacks should be strung up by their balls from the nearest tree.
I once went into our local land office looking for very old title deeds for our house, just for the sake of looking up some history. There was a young guy at the counter and he didn’t know how to find the record I wanted. He called over the late middle aged guy who said something like “OK, so we’ve got the current title number, so what you do is subtract 38 off that. Yeah, OK, now put that number in. OK now see that number there, take 466 off that, then halve it, and the old deed should be five less than that. There you go!”
Presumably when that older guy leave the organisation they are going to be screwed.
And also, in the Maintenance Manual instead of a note saying that the inspection only applies to -127 and subsequent, just list the part numbers it applies to. Then there is no chance for confusion.