MECHANICAL

20-10

Second Shift

Mechanical came together at Meridian Aircraft Service on the second shift in 1989. Three held mechanic certificates with Airframe and Powerplant ratings. One of the three also held Inspection Authorization, which meant his signature returned an airplane to service after an annual, and he reminded the others of it. The fourth held a repairman certificate in the propeller shop. The fifth worked the avionics bench. None of them, by their own account, intended to start a band.

What they intended to do was identify a vibration. A Continental engine at run-up in Hangar 4 produced a low resonant drone. Krantz called it a B-flat. Vandersloot said it was not. The argument ran the better part of a week, and by the end of it Bemis was holding the low end, Pruett had set a tempo against a shop tachometer, and Ostrander had recorded the engine off the test stand — a recording he insists to this day is not a sample but a document.

20-20

Within Tolerance

Mechanical held that music and maintenance were the same discipline practiced on different materials. A song, like an airframe, was either within tolerance or it was not. They tuned to A440 because the manual said so. They logged every performance to the tenth of an hour, the way one logs a Hobbs meter, and kept the sheets.

They refused to play any room without a concrete floor, for reasons they considered self-evident and declined to explain. Their label, Thrust Reverser Recordings, was named after a jet component by a band that played strictly piston aircraft, and the archive has never established why. Setlists were handed to the sound man as a run-up checklist. Nobody who worked with them found any of this unusual for long.

20-30

The Pilot

Emmett Ostrander was the outlier, and the band never pretended otherwise. He ran the keys, the samples, and the engine recordings — but the real distinction was simpler. He was the only member who left the ground. He held a Private Pilot certificate, and the other four were certificated to fix airplanes, not fly them. In hangar culture that is a real and affectionate divide, and Mechanical lived on the mechanic's side of it.

It sharpened the tagline. "Every noise has a part number" is a mechanic's creed: nothing that rattles is a mystery, only a part not yet found. Ostrander, who recorded engines for the band and flew through weather on his own time, is the one man in it who has heard a noise in the air that has no part number. He never mentioned it.

By 1998 the others had families and other shops, and the band came apart the way an annual inspection ends: quietly, on schedule, everything signed off. Krantz maintains the catalog is airworthy. To date, nobody has produced a squawk.