Message posted by Polemodel on October 19, 2010 at 20:19:03 PST:

The "when in doubt, keep it'" instinct can be very strong.

I was a contractor at one of the ALCs in the mid-late 1990s. Spent a lot of time on the AF e-pubs site, which was brand new back then, and in the TO library for the aircraft I was supporting.

So one day I round the corner into the TO area, and the guys are cleaning house. Two of those large rubbermaid garbage cans, the kind you'd use to haul garbage to the street, are in the middle of the area--one is about 8" deep in old TOs, and the other is overflowing. Way too heavy for 2 people to drag outside. I asked why they didn't just even out the loads, empty 'em, and come back for more.

The answer I got: "This one [the mostly empty one] is definitely old, and we'll trash them. These [the pile of TOs with a garbage can under it] are probably obsolete, but nobody knows for sure and no one's willing to take responsibility for them, so we're going to keep them in the trash can for now."

In their defense, I should note that these guys had to keep TOs applicable to every version of the aircraft still in service, including with foreign militaries, and they just didn't know for sure that there weren't one or two "A" and "B" models out there, somewhere. But the trash can did sit there for a couple months before it finally disappeared.

In Reply to: Re: Why are these two F-117 documents still available? posted by Paul on October 19, 2010 at 16:42:27 PST:

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