black Thursday

It's been a bad day at the ranch.  On top of everything else that's going on, I found out that my friend, old boss, and mentor, Glen Sutton, passed away.  The list of folks that had the most influence on my life is kind of short; Glen was one of those men.

I have a lot of fond memories about Glen, but nothing was more profound than a conversation we had about being a supervisor one day.  It was a short conversation, but an important one that I never forgot and influences me to this day in many relationships.  As I think back on many memories of Glen, I can still hear those words as clearly as the day they were spoken.

But that's not my best Glen moment.  The day he beat up the airplane will stay with me as one of the funniest things I'd ever seen.

We often, as human beings, ascribe personality traits to mechanical things, like our cars.  Airplanes are no different.  They are made of the same components, same wires, same metals, but different airplanes have different, for lack of a better term, personalities.  There was one particular airplane that Glen didn't like too well.  For about a year and a half that airplane gave us nothing but fits.  One day, he'd had enough.

We had worked on and off for a couple of days trying to find an intermittent problem with a warning light in a landing gear handle on this particular airplane, with no luck.  Glen had a theory of what it was, but we couldn't get it to malfunction.  On this particular morning, there was a flight crew on the airplane and they called us out because when the landing gear doors closed, the light in the gear handle remained on.

I watched as Glen jumped out of our little work truck, I think before it actually came to a stop, march up to that airplane, get a hand-hold of the airplane, and swing himself like he was on monkey bars, landing a swift kick to the landing gear door he suspected was the problem.  The next thing I saw was a pilot sticking his hand out the window with a big thumb up indicating that it was good now.  Without saying a word, he motioned for me to get back in the truck and we just went back to the shop.

Glen was in his early to mid-fifties at the time and pretty spry for an old guy.  That wasn't something very easy to do and the funny part of the story is that, except for routine maintenance, I don't think we worked on that jet again for a couple of months.  It was then, and still is, the funniest thing I ever saw at the airport.

Glen had mad crazy troubleshooting skills and 90% of what I know, I learned from him.  He was that damn good; no, he was the BEST.

I used to tell people that:  I'm not the best...I saw the best, worked for the best, and learned from the best.  He made me a better mechanic and a better person.  You can't say that too often about people around you sometimes, but Glen expected more from me sometimes than I did from myself.  He was always there for me, when life got hard and crazy with Shellie.  I owe him a lot for that, too.  Those are debts you can never repay.  I just hope I did him justice by trying my best to pay that forward.

We lost touch over the years.  It happens.  Life takes you in different directions, but I have nothing but admiration and respect for Glen and I'm grieving with his family today.

Thanks, GlenB, again, for everything.....