If I may lighten the tone somewhat, a few happy memories of civvy engineers, the vast majority of whom were from the services.
My S61 had a fault inbound to Unst. I entered the hangar, spotted a tall gangly form clinging to the gearbox of another S61 and enquired if the gangly form could help me. His response was a ring spanner flying past my head.
We became the best of mates when I immediately burst out laughing.
Australia, our pumas needed cleaning, so everybody, pilots, engineers, office staff..........(yes....office staff, everybody. It's like that out there, or was) turned up, rigged down to shorts and boots then waded in to clean them thoroughly. During this process the greeny's radio was transmitting Aussie Rules, one of the bendy toys got seriously fed up after his request for peace was ignored, he put a fire axe through the radio.
China, during a Typhoon alert we parked up our two pumas and a super puma in the hangar, ripped the gear box and head off for exchange, then gave the blades a deep clean while they were on racks. The Chinese pilots were incredulous when I turned to in shorts and got on with it, they were deeply and I mean deeply shocked when I got their boss, an Admiral in the Chinese Navy, to get them involved working alongside their own engineers. Apparently in a classless society there are deeper divisions than in our class ridden society.
I hope the above may prove that there are no boundaries, only those we create and then perpetuate. The hardest wall to get over is the wall that the services create. Knock it down, work alongside and with the engineering staff and your flying days will be much happier.
There remains one further benefit of a close liaison with the engineers. They know well before the managing pilot when there's a tasty posting coming up. Their grapevine is light years ahead of the drivers. A quiet word in my shell likes got me two very nice detachments that the boss hadn't known about until I wandered in.
Of course it may be that they just wanted rid of me but perish the thought, paranoid, Moi?
