I’m sure you’ve heard stories of some kind of wasted taxpayer money before. Well I’m sorry to say that some wasteful federal spending once happened because of me (at least on a smallish scale).
This is back in 2004, and the Air Force was paying my salary at the time. I was stationed at Fairchild Air Force Base, near Spokane, Washington. While I was waiting for some paperwork to go through, I supplemented the folks teaching water survival.
It was a cool gig. I don’t remember what happened each day of the week, but one day out of the week was a course where they simulate being in a helicopter that crashes in the water and rolls over as it sinks. Two other days out of the week was a course where they taught students how to signal from the ocean, how to use rescue devices that were dropped from aircraft, how to use radios and distress beacons, and the course culminated in a big production in the indoor pool where the students climbed into a big aircraft simulator that then “crashed” into the ocean. There were two already-inflated life rafts lashed to the side of the pool (with ice water inside). The lights were all shut off, a thunderstorm soundtrack played from enormous speakers up in the rafters, and strobe lights simulated lightning. As the students evacuated the “aircraft” and jumped into the water, my job was to spray them using a fire hose while on a catwalk up above. I’m not gonna lie, it felt crazy to be getting paid for stuff like this.
These courses were pretty messy and took some time to set up. We used the other two days out of the week to clean up all the wet gear and reset it to prepare for the next course. Those were good days to schedule medical/dental appointments and any other type of official errands that Uncle Sam mandated.
On one of those days, I was at some kind of appointment at the beginning of the day, then returned to the pool to help with prep. As it turned out, while I had been at my appointment, one of the instructors taught my colleague (someone that was supplementing, like me) how to pack LPUs, or Life Preservation Units. An LPU is a piece of survival gear that some aviators wear. When you’re descending toward the water while dangling from a parachute, you can pull the tabs on your LPU and two big high-visibility pontoons will inflate in a flash, providing more than enough buoyancy to keep you afloat.
Well, when I got back to the shop, my colleague showed me how to pack an LPU. Each LPU had two CO2 canisters that, when punctured by pulling the inflation tabs, quickly inflated the pontoons, even if completely submerged. Packing the LPUs meant unscrewing the old canisters, resetting the pull switches, screwing in new canisters, and then folding up the big orange/pink balloons into small compartments that could be easily worn by an aviator.
Unfortunately when my buddy showed me how to pack LPUs, he didn’t show me the right way. The two of us packed tons of LPUs and set them on the shelf, thinking they were ready for students in future classes to use. When they got pulled off the shelf and used during an actual lesson, students that ran off the diving board expecting their LPUs to inflate midair had to end up swimming for it.
While that’s obviously embarrassing for the water survival instructors, that’s not the part I owe taxpayers an apology for. The way the LPU puncture mechanism worked, it wasn’t physically possible to properly reset the mechanism without removing the new CO2 cylinders, and it wasn’t possible to remove the unused CO2 canisters without puncturing them. We had to intentionally pull the inflation tabs, knowing it would waste two perfectly good cylinders per LPU. Each cylinder that was improperly installed in an LPU had to be unscrewed and tossed on the floor, shooting all over the place like a corkscrewing balloon while turning ice cold from the sudden expansion of compressed gas.
Considering all the LPUs we packed and a rough guess that each CO2 cylinder cost about $10, we’re talking hundreds of dollars of wasted taxpayer money. It would’ve been far better to each waste a pair of cylinders by doing a quality control test after packing just a pair or two of the LPUs rather than the way we did it.
So for those of you that dutifully paid your taxes back in the 2003/2004 timeframe, I’m sorry I wasted some of your hard-earned money. The Government is funded by the people, and you deserve better than that. I wish I’d known to correct the mistake sooner! It’s been almost 20 years since I’ve been around LPUs, but that lesson has taught me to keep an eye out for ways to head off the wasteful use of resources (even if it’s as simple as making my kids finish the food on their plates before they can be excused).