Episode Details

Alfred Crabtree, founder of Blade Repair Academy, and Sheryl Weinstein of SkySpecs join to discuss standardized technician training and risk reduction in blade repair.

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Allen Hall: Alfred and Sheryl, welcome to the program.

Sheryl Weinstein: Thanks.

Allen Hall: So we’re in Dunlap, Tennessee, not too far from Nashville, uh, and also close to. Chattanooga Chattanooga, and we’re in the Smoky Mountains ish region.

We’re

Alfred Crabtree: no, we’re, we’re, you could consider it Appalachia for sure. Sure. Okay. Uh, we’re on the, in the valley called the Seche Valley, uh, which splits the Cumberland Plateau. So we’re, we’re in a valley and we have hills a thousand feet above us here. Yeah. Either way. It’s beautiful.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. It’s a great drive in here.

Alfred Crabtree: Yeah. It’s a unique place. Yeah.

Allen Hall: And we’re at Blade Repair Academy, which, uh, if you’re not familiar with Blade Repair Academy, you should be. Uh, because a lot of the good training that happens in the United States actually happens to play repair, repair Care blade, repair academy. Uh, yeah, it’s been a long week at uh, OMS this week and we got the introduction today.

This is the first time we’ve been on site. That’s right. And, uh, we wanted to see all the cool things that are happening [00:01:00] here. And it really comes down to technician training competency. Working with blades, working with tools, knowing what you’re doing up tower when you’re on the blade, which is hard to train.

It’s really hard to train, and both you and Cheryl have a ton of experience being up on blades and repairing blades and scarfing and doing all the critical features that have to happen to make blades work today. It’s a tough training regimen. There’s a lot to it and a lot of subtleties that don’t always get transferred over from teachers to students unless you have.

Done it for a number of years. You wanna kind of just walk through the philosophy of Blade Repair Academy?

Alfred Crabtree: Yes. The, uh, you’ve, you’ve outlined quite well some of the issues. The environment where we work is very hard to take a ti the time to put somebody through a training regimen. We’re so constrained by weather windows and then.