A SHORT ESSAY ON A SIMPLE BLEED SNAG.

Essays are a thing of the past. I think so.

In my college days, I had to study a lot of essays. Essays by Charles Lamb, Bertrand Russell, AJ. Cronin etc. Many of the essays were on trivial topics completely irrelevant to our surging age and energy. I still remember one “On doing Nothing”. Another one was “All about a Dog”. Some essays were on World wars and so on. We all hated the essays vehemently, even the girls. But there was something that kept us read those essays again and again. That was the Beauty of Narration. Short, crispy and unbelievably cute. As time went by, we graduated to our own lives and these essays gave way to innumerable miseries, pains and occasional smiles. We grew up to become persons strange to ourselves. That is a long story… and a sad one.

Recently, I re-invented that Essays are best suited to express trivial things — things as trivial as our lives and as trivial as any closed system ( for example the bleed system of an aircraft engine).

The technician on the headset beckoned me. As I reached, he yelled into my ear “ Captain is calling you”. This can be dangerous-sometimes very severe. Captain calling an engineer on arrival is the sign of a real problem- which cannot be rectified by selectively using technical nomenclatures and skillfully confusing him. I really got to use my grey matter now.

“#1 engine bleed is low at descent “, the captain stated as if I were the sole causative agent for that problem.

“What about at high power?” I made a customary return query.

“It was OK” the captain replied in between sipping his strongly odored coffee. “I am making an entry” he added.

“That is OK captain” I replied (my destiny, I know).

The Bleed snag is a Woman- if we give the snags gender names. Some snags sound horrible. For example, FCC-A FAILED, TCAS -1 FAILED, ATC-2 FAILED. But often, these snags are harmless. With a silly re-cycling of the CB, they disappear. They are Male snags — looks ugly and savagely mighty; but in fact very calm, harmless and soft-spoken. They are Male snags. But Bleed snag is Female. Fully feminine in all respects. You look deep into her eyes — you will be deceived. You don’t look into her eyes — you will be deceived. She is more elusive and capricious if you don’t have enough ground time. The lesser the ground time, the more elusive the snag is. But this time I was lucky. A quick visual inspection revealed a physically damaged High Stage Regulator. This is an industry problem. As your hairs get greyer, you get to know more of these. They call this phenomenon ‘experience’. I replaced the damaged Regulator, gave an idle run-up of #1 engine and confirmed that the snag was rectified.

Some snags are like this — they take birth just to get resolved.

The flight departed on time. The captain smiled through his windshield. I gave him an assuring thumbs up.