About six months ago, we ordered two replacement seatbets for a Cobra. We got them in, installed them correctly, signed off all the paperwork, and moved on with our lives.

Today, we got these:

Two radiators, four inches by eight inches by about forty inches long. Painted matte black, which made it hard to take the photo. (It's being held by our civilian technical representative.) They're made by Caterpillar Inc, which certainly suggests that they are designed for some kind of heavy equipment. Regardless, they aren't any good for us. We can't give them back, so we're probably going to throw them overboard at some point.

The good news is that they cost $400 each, which is peanuts for an aircraft component. We can pay that much for a short section of pipe, mostly because of the crazy certification standards necessary for aviation components.

If you're curious, we got these because they have the same part number as the seatbelt. When we ordered we also put down the code for the manufacturer, but I guess the expiditer (who pushes the parts request into the federal supply system) ignored that code.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:10 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 195 words, total size 1 kb.