Winners of the John J. Goglia Time Out For Safety Awards.

Two talented aviation maintenance professionals are the winners of the 2004 John J. Goglia Time Out For Safety Awards. There are two categories for the 2004 awards, Mechanic and Manager.

The John J. Goglia Time Out For Safety Awards are designed to recognize those who make a significant contribution to aviation maintenance safety. In the case of the Mechanic award, recognition is given for a mechanic performing a specific act of maintenance safety despite all the pressure to get the work done quickly. The Manager award acknowledges the contributions made by management personnel, especially as their work supports the safety efforts of mechanics and maintenance organizations.

John J. Goglia Time Out For Safety Award--Manager

This year's winner of the Manager Award is Jeffrey Lee Clements, manager of nondestructive testing for Delta Air Lines. Clements has been instrumental in helping an FAA-funded team from Iowa State University complete a significant study of the various factors that impact successful fluorescent penetrant inspection processes.

Clements and Delta helped the study team with full access to Delta TechOps facilities in Atlanta, Georgia during six visits, each of which lasted more than a week. "Not only did Lee complete all the necessary internal checks to enable the work to occur," wrote Lisa Brasche, program manager at Iowa State's FAA Center for Aviation Systems Reliability, in her nomination of Clements, "but he also spent many hours with the team on the floor as part of the research team. A typical day for Lee would begin at 6 a.m., his normal start time. Around 6:30 to 7 a.m., the research team would arrive and around 10 to 12 p.m., Lee and the research team would leave. Lee's dedication and willingness to put in some very long hours enabled us to gather massive amounts of data, which have been used to make changes in industry practices."

The research facilitated by Clements won the 2004 ATA/FAA Better Way Award and also led to improvements in Delta's internal NDT processes. Clements willingly shares his knowledge and delivers presentations at the annual Air Transports NDT Forum and helps industry colleagues with NDT problems, according to Brasche.

John J. Goglia Time Out For Safety Award--Mechanic

This year's winner of the Mechanic award is Steve Sinski, a mechanic on Continental Airlines's widebody crew in Newark, New Jersey. Sinski was nominated by colleague Stan Peters, the airline's Newark maintenance safety committee chairman, for a unique incident that could have been disastrous but was prevented before it could harm passengers.

On a typical August day last year, Sinski noticed that the L1 door was ajar on one of Continental's Boeing 767s. "This struck him as strange," wrote Peters in his nomination of Sinski for the award, "because the door should have been full open or closed. Steve's experience gave him caution and he peered through the opening at the L1 door and noticed that while the door was not armed, the slide was not secure. Steve then entered the aircraft through the L2 door to assess the situation from the inside of the aircraft, close up. The slide was precariously hanging on the door. Steve called for assistance and when two other techs arrived, Steve warned them about what he had found and then had them steady the slide while he made an effort to install the safety pin that would make the slide inflation bottle safe."

After attempting to find something with which he could pin the inflation bottle, Peters wrote, "Steve realized that the door was moving and that the slide was deploying inside the aircraft. Steve yelled a warning to the other techs. The slide ended up pinning Steve to the floor of the aircraft from where he commenced to punch holes in the slide to deflate it. He then found himself in a position to hold open the slide turbo valve to continue to deflate the slide."

Sinski didn't the let the matter drop there, but helped educate his fellow mechanics during the monthly safety meeting. He also has worked diligently to research the problem and wrote a maintenance and engineering bulletin and took pictures to help with the education process. "Steve's pictures make the scenario vivid," Peters wrote, "so that it may serve as a warning to his fellow technicians at Continental and throughout the airline industry."

Both Jeffrey Lee Clements and Steve Sinski will be honored for winning the John J. Goglia Time Out For Safety Awards at a ceremony to be held in January in Washington, D.C. And they will each receive a $500 honorarium in recognition of their dedication to helping making aviation safer by improving maintenance safety.