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Aircraft technician keeps jet-setters airborne

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Contributed by: Brendan Leonard/YourHub.com on 3/9/2008

Editor's note: Visit our Faces of South Metro page, where YourHub.com staff and readers can introduce you to more people who make this part of the metro area what it is.

Lee Smith typically spends most of his day repairing and tearing apart $8 million private jets in one of the hangars at Haggan Aviation at the Centennial Airport.

On Feb. 28, Smith, 49, is working in Hangar D on a checkup that private aircraft go through after 12 years of flight. It takes about 1,200 man-hours and costs a minimum of $100,000. His current project is a LearJet 60, operated by Executive Jet Management. He's a member of a five-member crew of aircraft maintenance technicians, each armed with rolling red toolboxes containing about $10,000 worth of tools. They'll spend about six weeks working on this plane, checking for cracks and malfunctions, and re-sealing, replacing and repairing parts.

The jet's seats, galley, and the entire interior have been removed, leaving Smith squatting over a complicated network of hoses, wires and tubes that line the inside of the jet's body. He knows the plane pretty well - he spent 3 days just taking the cockpit apart, seats, switch panels, floorboards, circuits and all. There's a mechanic's seat on wheels where the pilot usually sits.

"These big inspections, it's kind of like eating an elephant - a little piece at a time," Smith says. "It's a major demolition, and then you have to put it back together again."

Before the Littleton man makes any progress this morning, though, he's called away to repair a jet that's waiting to take off. He jumps in a Haggan Aviation van and drives across the tarmac - yielding to taxiing planes, which have the right-of-way - to the plane. He grabs his tool box, locates the screw, on the inside of the baggage door, picks the right screwdriver, and tightens a loose screw.

"How long did that take me?" he asks. About ten seconds.
"The paperwork will take a half-hour." When a technician is called out for an emergency repair, it's a minimum $180 charge. Five turns of a screw just cost someone $180.

"But that's nothing compared to what it would cost them if they lost the flight," Smith says. He says the operating cost of a LearJet is about $3,000 to $3,500 an hour, including the pilots, maintenance and fuel. Besides, he's had one of these minor repairs turn into a 40-day, $80,000 job before.

Haggan Aviation is a repair station specializing in Lear, Hawker, Citation, Westwind and Beechjet aircraft, at the Centennial Airport. The airport is the third-busiest general aviation airport in the nation - "general aviation" meaning no commercial airline flights, but lots of folks who can afford $3,000-an-hour jets. Pete Coors, Pat Bowlen, Phil Anschutz and Mike Shanahan are a few of the frequent flyers.

Twenty-five technicians do the technical work at Haggan, doing inspections, troubleshooting, maintenance and repairs. Smith says he likes the detective work of troubleshooting the best - finding out the cause of an intermittently blinking landing gear light, for example - "the real Sherlock Holmes, analytical thinking stuff," he calls it.

"I spend about two-thirds of my time looking for the wrench I just put down and can't find," Smith jokes. "I spend the other third working on airplanes."

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