Maintainers

Just a story from my time on Tornado during my RAF career. I joined 2001 as an Armourer and left in 2014 to work for BAE systems building nuclear subs. Loved my time on both 12 and 2 squadrons and spent a fair bit of time in desert type places. On one such important desert trip the navigator was most of the way through his packed lunch and got to his skittles. It would appear pilot/nav gloves remove some dexterity when it comes to opening these packets and the skittles ended up everywhere! Upon landing he mentioned to the lineys what had happened. I was called out to collect as many skittles as possible from the nav’s cockpit. Now I thought I had all of them as I’d spent a good 30 minutes with my head below the seat and legs dangling out the cockpit in 40c heat and couldn’t see anymore under the seat. The SengO however wasn’t satisfied that I had ALL skittles!! Going on memory I think I’d collected around 40 or so to which he asked ‘but how many are in a pack?’ So we opened another 30 packets, counted the skittles in each one and tried to work out an average (beyond Armourer capability). Turns out I was 3 short of the average. So you’ll guess what comes next. Armourers pulling the seats, in the heat, to search for the 3 missing skittles!! We never did find anymore but I did find a Bic pen lid that hadn’t been mentioned!!