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back to Van Gardner StoriesChuck Henderson Gets The 00202 Bug
About four months after I returned from Cape Canaveral I was bias testing the 704 at Lockheed and I got a stop on the 753 Tape Control diagnostic. I was scooping along when it dawned on me that I had seen this bug before. It was the old error stop 00202 I had seen at the cape. I looked a the test point where we had the sliver pulse at the cape and there it was. I changed the same tube and it fixed my problem, but that’s not the end of this story.
About three months later I received a call from Chuck Henderson at Eglin Air Force Base in Fort Walton, Florida. He said he was getting a stop at 00202 on the Tape Control diagnostic and they could not fix it. He wanted me to get on a plane and come help. I told him I has fixed that problem twice before and looked in my diagrams and gave him the test point for the sliver pulse. He came back to the phone a few minutes later and said there was no sliver pulse there and wanted me on the next plane.
I went to the Atlanta airport and caught a Southern Airlines DC-3 to Eglin Air Force Base. The DC-3 was not pressurized so they stayed below 12,000 feet. They were also slow. I was watching our shadow on the ground moving parallel to the highway and I noticed the tractor trailer trucks were passing it. I had made a trip to Huntsville, Alabama which was surrounded by mountains and when I left the DC-3 had to make three circles around the city to gain enough altitude to go over the mountains. When we started to descend the sinus over my eyes started to hurt so bad I thought I was going to cry. The lack of pressurization caused this. At this time the Air Force let Southern land at the air base and use one of the hangars as a terminal. The building that the 704 was in was next to this hangar.
When we landed Chuck had waked over to the plane to meet me. I told him I could not believe there was no sliver pulse where I told him to look. Chuck was an excellent Technician and took a little offense at what I had said. He said, “Well the scope is still hooked up to that test point so you can see for yourself”.
When we got to the machine I looked at the scope and there was no sliver pulse on the screen. I looked at the time base knob on the scope and it was set high in the millisecond range. I turned it down to the one microsecond per centimeter range and there was the sliver pulse. We changed the tube and fixed the trouble. Chuck was very embarrassed and said lots of bad words. The DC-3 I flew in on was still there being readied to go back to Atlanta so I got on it. Not once did my fingers actually leave my hands and I never took my coat off.
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