Airmen keep traveling birds clean Published March 6, 2006 By Lisa Terry McKeown 43rd Airlift Wing Public Affairs POPE AIR FORCE BASE, N.C. (AFPN) -- What is left on an aircraft when the cargo, passengers and crew are gone? Trash, filled lavatories and a lot of cleaning to be done. It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Those brave people are the fleet service representatives. Dressed in blue “frog togs” and equipped with latex gloves, face shields and their lavatory servicing tools, the fleet service reps service almost every aircraft that touches down here. If the aircraft has come from overseas, the first thing the reps do is conduct agricultural inspections to make sure there are no foreign bugs aboard. “If any of the passengers have been near livestock or farm areas, we have to spray their shoes with a solution that will kill the germs,” said Airman 1st Class Christopher Berryman, 3rd Arial Port Squadron. “Then we go through and search all of the cargo, vehicles and pallets to make sure they are clean.” Pope’s fleet service reps, part of the 3rd APS, are the only aerial port in the Air Force that takes care of the agricultural responsibilities for overseas aircraft. Other bases have contracted agriculture officers who meet the aircraft. Because of a North Carolina law, the 3rd APS Airmen are responsible for keeping foreign diseases from reaching American soil. Once the aircraft is cleared, the reps go to work cleaning the lavatories -- the hardest and dirtiest part of their job. “The hardest part of the job is trying to remember where everything is on all of the different aircraft,” Airman Berryman said. The reps see anything from the huge C-5 Galaxy to the tiny C-20, and everything in between. The hook-ups, type of lavatory and mode of flushing can be different for every aircraft. If something is not hooked up properly, waste could end up all over the reps and the flightline. “Most of them you hook up, pull a handle or flip a switch, hook up your blue juice, flush it with water and fill it back up with blue juice,” said Staff Sgt. Gina Ward, 3rd APS. It sounds like a simple process, and on a good day, it would be. But when things go wrong in fleet services, things get very dirty. In many of the aircraft, the lavatory cleaning process consists of flipping a switch or pulling a lever that releases the waste from the lavatory and sends it down a chute, through a small opening in the aircraft and into a hose that’s attached to the lavatory service truck’s waiting container. Imagine you are one of the reps standing outside a C-5. You walk to the small, closed door and open it to attach the hose to the aircraft. Unfortunately, the crew who serviced the C-5 before you, missed a few steps or didn’t flip all the switches back to their needed positions. Because when you open the door, a flood of waste mixed with blue juice comes pouring out of the chute and lands all over you. All fleet service reps will “get dumped on” at least once in their career, if not more. “It might not happen every day here at Pope,” said Senior Airman Nick Pinette. “But somewhere around the Air Force, it’s happening to somebody.” Not all aircraft have chutes and use hoses to remove the waste. Some, like the C-130, have “honeybuckets” -- basically a bucket that holds the waste from the in-flight lavatory. The buckets are double-lined with trash bags that have to be manually removed by the reps. “It’s a sweet name for a sour job,” Airman Berryman said. Another type of lavatory is the portable latrine, also known as a “torpedo.” The bullet-shaped latrine has to be manually removed from the aircraft, carried to the lavatory service truck and emptied into the “poop tank.” If there is a spill on the flightline, it’s up to the fleet reps to clean the area. The pieces of waste and decomposing toilet paper have to be picked up first, and then they take a water truck out and spray the area clean. Aside from the obvious mess that the waste can make, there is the smell. “You have people who can do this and it doesn’t bother them,” Airman Berryman said. “Then you have people that smell it and get sick.” They said the smell is 100 times worse in the summer heat, but that the blue juice helps a little. Blue juice is the liquid mixed with the waste to degrade the contents and help mask the smell. The reps are also responsible for clearing the aircraft of any trash. “Usually the commercial aircraft have the most trash,” said Airman Pinette. “There have been a couple of times their trash has filled the back of two pick-up trucks.” By the time the fleet service reps leave an aircraft, it is bug, waste and trash free. Thanks to their dirty job, the aircraft can continue to fly. As Sergeant Ward said, “If the aircraft isn’t sanitary, it can’t fly.” “I never thought about it before I got this job,” Airman Pinette said. “Now I realize all that goes into preparing an aircraft -- even the little bitty things.”