This is part of a series shared ecumenically with members to whom I was assigned; the goal was to start conversation and deep thought, and many of these messages led to great conversations.
Fix It or Trash It
Original Publication Date: 18 February 2025
I once had a friend who had a taillight go out. When we pointed out the burned-out bulb he became visibly frustrated and declared, “I’m done with this car!” He wasn’t joking, a few days later he traded it in for a new car.
As resilient maintainers you know that a lightbulb is an inexpensive and easy repair, and it’s not the end of a vehicle’s usefulness. But if you’re not resilient and your mindset is to throw things away instead of fixing them, then a minor inconvenience turns into a major event; frustrating, expensive, and life-changing.
Spiritual resilience can come from many places, but I’d argue that they all have this in common: Broken does not mean irredeemable. Most things are fixable. One of my crowning maintenance achievements was in rebuilding F-22 1018 after its APU lit on fire while trying to evacuate for a hurricane. In a perfect world where we had as many F-22s as we could want and the assembly line was still open, Raptor 18 would have almost certainly been written off as a total loss. But because we need every F-22 we can get, we invested 8 months of tiger teams and factory service reps and new structures and wire harnesses and ducting, ship 18 took to the skies again costing 20% more than it did before the fire.
If you’re working on an airplane this week, what are you fixing? How much does it cost (I’d bet it’s not cheap)? How ridiculous would it be if we decided to scrap the whole aircraft because of the repair you’re making? What if broken meant irredeemable?
Yet I meet Airmen every week who are ready to scrap their career or worse just because they’ve made mistakes or life isn’t going the way they want. I’m not shy in sharing the many pieces of adverse paperwork I’ve collected over my career. Most of those were earned and I shudder when I think of the cost in broken equipment, lost manhours, embarrassing situations, and stupid decisions. But if we don’t let these things break us, we can repair, recover, and redeem all of our circumstances. Maybe they do close one door to us, but that doesn’t mean we’re grounded forever, and a huge part of spiritual resilience is recognizing that mistakes are not the end. Often times they can even make us better maintainers, supervisors, friends, and people.
“Franken-bird” is in the news this week; that's a nick-name for two F-35s damaged, seemingly beyond repair, that proved that scrapped airplanes can fly again.
I like how Thomas Edison said it, “I have not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work!” He also said, “I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.” If he had given up on the first failure imagine where we'd be, there is even a reasonably good chance we wouldn't be reading this on a computer monitor which draws its direct lineage all the way back to his inventions.
As your chaplain I can’t fix much on my own, but I have direct access to powerful redemption tools that can make the most broken life and career airworthy again. Stop by my office or give me a call for a free damage assessment and a plan for recovery.
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