News

Concrete barriers used to test C-17 fuel leak fix

  • Published
  • By Wayne Crenshaw
  • 78 ABW/PA
ROBINS AIR FORCE BASE, Ga. --  Who knew that concrete barriers could be used in C-17 repair? Or that the 78th Civil Engineer Group and the 78th Logistics Readiness Squadron could pull double duty in the field of aircraft maintenance? That's exactly what happened recently when maintainers here needed to test the fix of a pesky fuel leak that had been plaguing a C-17 for six years.

"It was a whole team effort," said Tech Sgt. Bobby Gates of the 78th LRS. "That's day to day what we do."

The trouble with the leak is that it only happened under a certain condition, which was when the plane was heavily loaded and low on fuel. Upon consultation with Boeing, the maker of the C-17, it was determined that in order to test the repair, the plane would have to be flown with 100,000 pounds of payload. The C-17 maintainers here had never had to do anything like it before.

While it might sound simple enough, it isn't. Most flightline personnel repair and maintain planes, they don't load them. There is no in-house loadmaster, the person who makes sure that a plane is loaded properly and not overloaded. And there are no tanks or MRAPs handy to drive on aircraft to easily meet the load requirement.

More specifically, you can't just put anything on a plane, said Chuck Shipes, flight chief of the 562nd Aircraft Maintenance Squadron.

The first thought was to simply drive some vehicles onto the plane, but there are some strict Air Force regulations about that. All of the fuel would have to be drained out of the vehicles, and the maintainers would have to get each vehicle certified to be transported on an aircraft.

"It was going to be about two weeks of red tape, if it was even approved," Mr. Shipes said.

He then considered using lead weights that are used on the flightline in aircraft repair. But all of those totaled only 47,000 pounds.

Mr. Shipes was driving around the flightline with Joe Barlow, the flightline production superintendent, to find more lead weights when Mr. Shipes noticed some concrete barriers. He got out and looked, and noticed writing on one that put the weight at 5,500.

"It just clicked in my head that with 20 of these, I've got 100,000 pounds of weight," he said.

He contacted the 78th CEG, and they agreed to loan him 20 concrete barriers. Through "trial and error" the 78th LRS Air Freight section came up with a way to palletize the barriers so that they could safely travel on the plane.

A team from the 78th LRS, led by Master Sgt. Jennifer Nesbitt, did the palletizing and assisted in loading. Sergeant Gates, who works in the Air Freight section, said it was a slow process to find the best way to palletize and load the barriers. A Boeing loadmaster was on hand to make sure everything was properly balanced and secured.

Sergeant Gates said the Air Freight section here loads a variety of cargo but had never loaded concrete barriers before.

The test flight was conducted July 31 and the repair checked out. The load was then left on the plane for 24 hours on the ground to further ensure there was no leaking.

Mr. Shipes said that the reason the load cause the leak is that the fuel is in the wings, and with a heavy load and light fuel the wings would flex upward at the tips, causing the fuel to shift and leak where it hadn't previously.