Warbird Information Exchange

Nah....just 7 years as a Junior Flight Test Instrumentation Engineer on F-16's, F-111's and a couple of other programs.

As to the maintenance items, they are probably going through the aircraft and making any minor adjustments that need to be done such as tweaking the control throws, adjusting limiting switches, stops ect. Also, as you open up the envelope you tend to find things that need some attention in one way or another. Any aircraft that is being used in a flight test program is going to be subject to an extraordinary amount of maintenance time, even if every thing works perfectly. Belive it or not, a test program will tend to accelerate the wear on an aircraft to the point that when the program is over, the a/c will essentially have used up it's first operational life in significantly fewer hours. I know of one F-16 test a/c that is pretty well used up and has less than 3000 hours total time.