By Gidget Fuentes - Staff writer
Posted : Saturday Jan 19, 2008 7:20:44 EST

NAVAL AIR STATION NORTH ISLAND, Calif. — The F/A-18C Hornet, perched atop scaffolding and sliced into three sections, wasn’t going anywhere.

The jet, disassembled and wingless, awaited the installation of a new center barrel that will strengthen its backbone in an effort to breathe years of life into it.

Inside a nearby hangar, a small tractor towed an overhauled Marine Corps CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter to North Island’s flight line for testing before it returns to its San Diego-based squadron. Another Super Stallion would soon arrive at Fleet Readiness Center Southwest to take its place.

The military’s major West Coast aircraft repair center, at Naval Air Station North Island, is the fix-it, overhaul-it place for battle-worn or broken Navy and Marine Corps jets, helicopters and transport aircraft. Established by 2005 base closure and realignment legislation, FRC Southwest and five other fleet readiness centers fix and overhaul Navy and Marine aircraft at a fraction of the cost of buying replacements, officials say.

Driving the fast pace of the work is the Navy’s “AirSpeed” initiative, which officials say does a faster job of getting jets and helos fixed and back to the fleet.

“We can get more efficient as far as our turnaround times because there will be less hand-offs between different organizations,” said Navy Capt. Michael Kelly, who this month took command of FRC Southwest, the sea services’ largest aviation repair and maintenance facility.

Officials said FRC Southwest completed $537 million worth of fixes, upgrades or modifications on 286 aircraft during fiscal 2007 — 111 Hornets, 63 H-1 Super Cobra or Huey helicopters, 47 H-60 Seahawk helicopters, 28 EA-6B Prowler jets, 10 E-2 Hawkeyes, 10 C-2 Greyhounds, nine H-53E helicopters and eight AV-8B Harrier jets.

Opened in October 2006, the center incorporated 4,000 sailors and Marines after the Navy reorganized its aviation maintenance, repair and overhaul facilities to establish Fleet Readiness Center Command, based at Patuxent, Md., which merged three naval aviation depots with 11 aircraft intermediate maintenance departments into six regional fleet readiness centers.

The merger is considered the top Defense Department money-saving move of the 2005 BRAC process, according to the Government Accountability Office.

“The truly jaded people can think that government is slow, slothful, noninnovative, cost-insensitive, couldn’t come up with a good idea if they have to. But we are very cost-sensitive,” Kelly said. “Our folks are very innovative. They really like what they do, and we actively benchmark ourselves against the commercial guys to see ... who’s hot and who’s not. We like to play to win.”

Kelly credits the fleet support teams that work on individual aircraft.

“They do some very complicated stuff. They try and figure out how to take airplanes and, in some cases, use them well beyond their intended service life, doing all kinds of science and analysis and some really innovative thinking,” he said. “Can we replace something, can we modify something so that the airplane and the weapon system still remain viable and effective?”
Helping the flow

Officials here know that broken jets and helicopters do little good stuck in a hangar or on a ship awaiting the arrival of new parts, maintenance or repair. So there’s much focus on turnaround time.

After the first CH-53E overhaul took 380 days, Marine Corps officials “challenged us to support them to really cut our turnaround time,” Kelly said. “We’ve dropped our cycle time down to 175 days ... we’re meeting the goals that they’re setting for us as far as getting them turned around and getting them back.”

Workers are conscious of how important it is to get aircraft back to the fleet. “I’ve been extremely focused on dollars in the last year and a half,” said Kevin Okerman, the F/A-18 program manager. “This year, I’m all focused on that time.”

Officials redesigned the work floor so it’s more efficient, starting with the aircraft’s disassembly to final assembly and then onto flight testing. So in a busy hangar, Okerman can track the movement of each Hornet through each phase of maintenance and repair.

Many officials credit AirSpeed — formerly “Lean Six Sigma” — with helping improve processes, from assessing what work is needed to ordering spare parts to scheduling final flight testing to changing bad habits. All of that shortens the time it takes to get aircraft fixed and operational. A delay in fixing a single part or long wait for a replacement part, they note, can have a ripple effect on other repairs and delay completion.

The cavernous hangars are all about creating better flow, such as putting all necessary tools for a particular repair in a single toolbox or crafting kits with pre-cut slots to hold every piece removed from a wing. That saves time wasted looking for a misplaced wrench or money to replace a missing part.

The E-2 Hawkeye Early Warning Aircraft and C-2 Greyhound cargo aircraft support teams, for example, are set up in color-coded cells, each responsible for its share of work within a targeted time frame to meet the overall deadline. “Now there’s a design flow and rhythm to the production line,” said Cmdr. Doug Lucka, E-2/C-2 deputy program manager and a veteran pilot.

Each aircraft’s progress is tracked in daily meetings at the “war room,” a space off the main work floor with hanging wipe-boards detailing the progress of each cell. “There’s enough data here that we’re capturing in a daily, weekly and monthly basis,” Lucka said, glancing at the boards that note a part’s late arrival or hiccup in the assembly line.

“Everything is inventoried and accounted for; therefore, we don’t lose anything,” said retired Marine Lt. Col. Dave Kelly, who oversees the H-53 product line. “It’s made us a lot more efficient. I can’t believe we didn’t operate like that before.”
An aircraft’s life

With ongoing combat rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan and at-sea deployments, officials expect the aircraft repair business to continue to grow. FRC Southwest field service repair teams travel to other bases, go to sea and travel the globe, making 2,585 “house calls” last year.

Most jets and helicopters require scheduled maintenance — akin to a car’s 60,000-mile checkup, officials like to say — but some arrive in bad shape, needing fixes from combat action, mishaps or just wear and tear. “We use it more, so it wears out a little more,” Kelly, the commanding officer, said. “Naval aviation is a pretty harsh environment to begin with.”

The CH-53E is the Corps’ heavy hauler, a workhorse in big demand and in limited supply.

The Hornet, the primary fighter jet for the Navy and Marine Corps, is FRC Southwest’s biggest program so far, pulling in more than $95 million to fix or overhaul 111 Hornets, or 17 percent of the fleet. Center barrel replacements extend the Hornet’s expected lifespan of 6,000 flight hours by about 7,000 flight hours at “a fraction” of the cost of a new jet, officials said.

The Hornet’s center barrel, the “backbone” that holds the wings and landing gear, “is the main stress component,” Kelly said.

In a replacement, work crews split the F/A-18 in half to separate the nose from the tail and install a new center barrel section bought for about $250,000 from the Northrop Grumman facility in El Segundo, near Los Angeles. The program began 15 years ago, after a Hornet was damaged in a crash. It is extensive work, involving 20,000 fasteners, 2,200 spare parts and 153 people working 26,000 hours; when combined with other heavy depot repairs, the replacement takes about a year to complete.

E-2 Hawkeye and C-2 Greyhound updates include upgraded landing gear and airframes. Crews rewire the entire C-2 — all 23 miles of wiring, some of which includes upgraded, fire-resistant wires — in life-extension work that takes about a year to complete and will carry the aircraft to the year 2025.
Working side by side

With the Navy and Marine Corps flying aircraft longer and in harsher environments, workers are fixing or replacing more and more components, officials say.

“A lot of these parts were never designed to come out of the airplanes, and you see that a lot in the center barrel area,” Okerman said. In some cases, artisans have had to make their own tools to remove a part or do a repair, especially on older aircraft.

Workers inspect and repair 11,713 items from airframes, engines and aircraft components ranging from electrical to instrument panels and navigation. They must stay current on newer models and components, such as the “glass cockpits” on newer H-60 helicopters.

The merger of naval aviation depots and aircraft intermediate maintenance departments brought together uniformed sailors and civilian workers, many of whom retired or served in the Navy or Marine Corps, to work side by side.

In some cases, civilian workers know more about older aircraft radios, for example, that weren’t covered in aviation technical training. “We feed off of their knowledge,” said Aviation Electronics Technician 2nd Class Peter Fernandez, an identification friend or foe/navigation work center supervisor.

“All you can do is just jump in with both feet and get on-the-job training working hand in hand with the workers,” added Aviation Electronics Technician 1st Class Amy Baker, the leading petty officer.

Ajai Johnson, a former sailor who supervises the APX-100 IFF transponder section, said the revamped process makes the work easier, since all parts and expertise are close by.

“Everything is right here,” said Johnson, who spent 10 years as an aviation electronics technician. “You don’t have to try to figure out what’s wrong with it.

“It’s a whole new way of thinking,” he added.

http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2008/01/marine_fixing_air_080118/

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