Three new ones, I think. They had me down for all the last 5 but two bigwigs decided they wanted to collect the final two. I was very happy about that. You see, the final couple include all the components that they had in the training workshops. They don't throw those away. Even though they've had God knows how many apprentices poking and bodging them for years, they end up in the last couple of airplanes. The company test aircrew do the first flight, but the workers don't come out onto the pan expecting an 'impressive' departure like they do when the 'customer' turns up. And of course it was more 'exciting' personally because I'm not as good as the test pilots, so it was likely to be far more entertaining if something serious went wrong.
I also flew a number of F3s that had been Christmas trees for a while whilst waiting for spares when the RAF hit its first post-Cold War spares crisis. You'd have lots of captions and weird sh!t happening, some false warnings, some real. Me and another sim instructor, both very used to multiple emergencies handling, and also both systems lecturers, would I think sensibly be given the job of doing a "shakedown" and bringing the jet home, normally within 15 minutes, to see what fell off and what didn't. This is worth bearing in mind given how long the MAXs will have been in storage. I'm sure the guys at Davis-Monthan have even more entertaining tales to tell about getting aircraft airborne out of storage.
