OK, fantastic stories of stupid. The grenade one had me filling my shorts...not just stupid maintenace but was things so bad as to need to put live hand grenades next to the only (known) part of a driving maching that can self detonate?!?!
Gotta throw in my stupid story. Helicopter rotor heads are held on by compression of pieces of metal called split cones. These items can only be installed one way, period. Noway, no how can you put them in upside down AND install the rotor head correctly. Wrong. On the Huey, the split cones are hard to see once installed. If installed correctly all flight control adjustments are correct, nothing normally has to be done. to anything. Subject idiot (read I D ten T) installed split cones upside down. Checked rotor head adjustments with appropriate measuring devices and found them all wrong. Light bulb was burnt out, no idea something was wrong. Made all adjustments to make rotor controls fit correctly. Took almost an entire 8 hour shift screwing up this helicopter. Next shift comes on, is told everything is set, all red X's have been signed off and is ready for test flight (FCF to you rotor heads). Crew walks out to aircraft, does a quicky preflight and jumps in the seat. Night shift Crew Chief hooks up power, engines start and rotor begins spinning. Already feels "funny" but it's a test flight so "funny" things can happen. Got the bird to 100% and brought it into a hover (ten foot IGE). Bird was shaking so hard the windshield center post was flexing. Crew imediately landed and shut down in record time. Got out and watched Crew Chief climb up top and see if he could determine what went wrong. Crew Chief turned absolutely white with eyes as big as saucers
. "Split cones are upside down Sir", says the Crew Chief to the Pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer. Many filled flight suits
. Flight Safety gets called, Ground Safety gets called and Commender gets called. All want to see the upside down split cones...many filled flight suits later
, Crew Chief gets decertified on rotor installation, retrained and back flying the next day (he was best buds with the maintenance chief). Strangly enough, no one ever was available to fly test flights (FCFs) on any bird he worked on for the rest of my time in the quadron, which was about 2+ years.
If the book says it can't be done, it can be done by a sufficiently stupid person. Not just any stupid person can manage idiotic acts of this magnatude, it takes a real moron to mess this kind of thing up.
Someday I'll tell the one about the engine rigging gone bad but that's it for today. Oh and I've never seen a battery blow up except when I threw a D cell in a bonfire. there's a reson for the warning but it sure was fun