It happened from one day to the next. My manager asked if I could get on a plane and fly to a small island in the southern carribean to perform a borescope inspection for an engine that was being taken from one plane and being placed on an another. I had done this inspection plenty of times by this point and was confident in my abilities. I talked it over with my family and decided to take the assignment. It would be my first international trip since arriving in the U.S.
The flight departed Miami in the late afternoon and arrived in Curaçao at night. This would be the first of many trips to the southern Caribbean to perform borescope inspections.
The inspection was a standard borescope inspection to look for obvious damage so it was like every inspection I had done before. The difference is that it was in the presence of the airline who would be installing the engine so the pressure was on to do my job by the book.. Each time I was called down to perform an inspection, there would a be a different scenario waiting for me. Some inspections were done with the engine mounted on the aircraft creating more challenging situations, other times I would arrive before the plane that had the engine due for inspection so I would sit and wait for it to arrive, deplane, pull up to the hangar and wait for the engine to cool down before attempting to inspect. Often times I would arrive late in the evening, perform the inspection, sleep for a few hours and leave the next morning allowing no time for tourism and exploration of the island.
Two times I saw the island during the day and early evening and it left an impression. The culture was that of Dutch descent but appropriated by an island people. The local language, Papiamentu, was as unique as the people who lived there. They also spoke three or four languages (English, Spanish, Dutch, Papiamentu) as it was part of their schooling. There was a bridge that at the mouth of the harbor which sat on pontoon boats and swung open sideways to let ships into the harbor. This was one of the tourist draws as you could be trapped on the bridge until it connected to the shores again.
The island sat on an undersea plateau that supported a large coral reef colony. This meant that the island beaches were all coral and very little sand.
The airport sat next to the sea, which is not a great place for an airplane if you want to keep corrosion at bay. I believe this is part of the reason that those jets needed so much maintenance, engines included. The salty conditions and high humidity caused components to fail quicker than normal and since most of the planes were over 20 years old, they required frequent visits from technicians like myself to keep them in service. Theres a reason that major airlines have discontinued use of this aircraft and engine. Regardless of popularity, they’re too expensive to keep around. The work in the field made an impact on the pieces I was making in the studio.
A lot of very intricate and tedious work was invested into making some of these pieces which meant that a few were ever produced and even fewer made it to a final piece.
There were plenty of other field services which took me to places I never would have thought of visiting. These places were also full of inspiration for the work I was currently producing, one place even allowed me the chance to see something I had only been able to see on TV and had wanted to visit before I died. It’s fitting then that it would be called a bone yard.
Oicata Ceramics 
Leave a comment