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Intake covers attached to aircraft on the flight deck.


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Were loose/hangy things such as exhaust covers, intake covers, pitot tube covers, etc. allowed on aircraft sitting on the flight deck? I know they were cool on the hangar deck, but I was kind of thinking they'd be a no-no up top because 1) a flight deck can get windy and it's already dangerous enough without extraneous crap blowing about, and 2) if a cover got loose it could cause a lot of FOD issues, even if there were no flight ops underway at the time, BUT today, while Googling photos (coincidentally this happens to be the exact airframe I'm building), I stumbled across this photo...which means I *could*, in fact, put a Tomcat on a flight deck diorama with covers on it? Would this be a rare event, or am I wrong and was it pretty common to have aircraft on the flight deck with covers and such on it?

TOMCAT ON DECK WITH INTAKE COVERS

Edited by TomcatFanatic123
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All covers are forbidden on the flight deck during operations. The photo you are posting is taken at a port where the carrier would stay for one or two days and operations cease. Hence all jets will have their covers to protect from FOD. If you are building a diorama that presents a busy flight deck then you should avoid using covers. Check that out. CVN-75 during cruise in the Mediterranean.

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Edited by EagleAviation
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Another situation that covers are used is engine run ups. The intake covers however are completely different and are firmly attached to the jet.

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Those are called "turn screens", and they are used on deck or on the flight line when maintenance crews need to run up the engines.

The picture linked in the OP shows an aircraft parked on deck while the carrier is in port. We would put the cloth intake and engine covers on then to keep birds and other foreign objects from residing there while the flight deck was more or less open to anyone who is on the ship. We would never use them on the flight deck while underway, unless we put show covers on a bird for a photo op. They would blow away with all the wind over the deck.

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Like when you take your car out on the highway and open her up to "blow the carbon out"?? :)/>/>/>

So check this out... sometimes we have to burn all the fuel out of the cells in lieu of just hooking the hose up and doing a standard defuel. One of the functions a maintainer can perform when operating the engines is to do that burn-down. Doing one at idle takes quite a while, and even at full mil it can take forever too. It is easiest to hook up the big chain to the NLG strut and throw that sucker in full AB. They normally ask for an avionics guy (like me for instance) to sit in the back seat, if it is a two-seat bird, to run up the systems. Talk about a rush... on the ship, normally we do burn downs at full blower at night time... when everyone below decks is trying to sleep! :)/>/>

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Edited by Neeko
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