News

Maintenance steering Group to ensure C-5 Galaxy mission capability, availability

  • Published
  • By Amanda Creel
  • 78 ABW/PA
Robins Air Force Base, GA --  Improving aircraft availability is a priority throughout the Air Force and the C-5 Galaxy fleet is working to ensure aircraft availability is at an optimum level in the future.

The C-5, which is sustained here, is the first to use a commercial process called a Maintenance Steering Group to help ensure the fleet is mission ready.

The mission of the MSG-3, which is part of the 730th Aircraft Sustainment Group, is to increase C-5 availability for the warfighter. Though the purpose is to have more C-5s in the sky, there is a secondary benefit--a cost reduction.

The MSG-3 team estimates aircraft availability to be increased by seven, which Scott Wrigley, chief of C-5 systems engineering, described as a conservative estimate of renewed aircraft availability once the program is in full swing.

The key to the success of the MSG-3 is to decrease unscheduled maintenance, said Mr. Wrigley.

Unscheduled maintenance makes up the majority of maintenance performed on the C-5 fleet, he said.

"An aircraft never breaks down as you are pulling into the maintenance hangar," Mr. Wrigley added.

He said it is important to be proactive and use the past maintenance on the aircraft to reduce downtime in the field.

"After 40 years we have a lot of history on this plane, we know how long something on the aircraft is going to last," Mr. Wrigley said.

This knowledge allows maintainers at the depot -level to make informed decisions about areas of the aircraft that might need maintenance.

The MSG-3 plans to use more in-depth inspections such as major and minor isochronal inspections to ensure any needed maintenance for the aircraft is done before the aircraft is returned to the field.

"We are really going to get into the weeds for that inspection," Mr. Wrigley said.

Needed maintenance is determined as anything that the maintainers feel will not make it to the aircraft's next scheduled maintenance interval, explained Mr. Wrigley.

"You get more bang for your buck when you address unscheduled maintenance during scheduled maintenance," said Dodd Hamlin, reliability engineer.

By being proactive the maintenance is done before the malfunction occurs, which eliminates additional part failures related to the malfunction. For example when a gear in the gearbox is replaced before it fails it eliminates the threat of damage to the timing belt that could rip the engine apart.

Mr. Hamlin explained that maintenance issues found in the field are more costly because a Maintenance Recovery Team will have to be taken away from its home station to wherever the mechanical failure occurred.

"If you fail in Timbuktu, you don't have the facility or the tools to fix the failure. So we have to send an MRT to the location. This means they are leaving their home station shorthanded. We don't have a team just waiting around to recover an aircraft," Mr. Hamlin said.

The question is do we want to pay for the maintenance now or later said Russ Alford, chief engineer.

"We can either do it now or in Baghdad," Mr. Wrigley said.

One of the reasons the majority of maintenance has been unscheduled is program depot maintenance has been designed to primarily look at structural maintenance, which only accounts for about 20 percent of C-5 maintenance the trio explained.

By focusing on structural maintenance issues during PDM, mechanical, electrical and avionics or system issues on the aircraft, which make up the other 80 percent were going unnoticed or unrepaired.

"We traditionally don't look at (system issues) until the functional test," Mr. Alford said.

"Now we are going to be looking at the aircraft from tip to tail," Mr. Wrigley said. "It should cut down on all those last minute problems we find at functional test."

The MSG-3 philosophy is to 'fix it before its broke' rather than "flying to fail" the way the C-5 program has done in the past.

Doing other needed maintenance during scheduled maintenance will not lengthen the amount of time the aircraft spends in maintenance because the maintenance can be done simultaneously, Mr. Wrigley said.

However, it will allow the time between PDM cycles to increase such as for the C-5 A and C models it will increase from five to eight years and for the B model from seven to eight years.

Along with the PDM, the hierarchical maintenance program also schedules maintenance events on a smaller scale in shorter time increments such as four-year, 16-month and four-month tasks.

The MSG-3 methodology's longer PDM cycles were tested or prototyped on two C-5s known to be problem aircraft.

The first of which had 39 slat failures and the second had 14 in the 12 months prior to the methodology change. In the 24 months after the change, the first had one slat problem reported and the latter had none.

The trio said they have already made great strides in preparing to implement the new maintenance philosophy such as building the maintenance packages for the C-5 and converting from traditional technical order books to commercial-based workcards, which can be easily converted to a digital system.

"We are trying to get out of the dark ages," Mr. Wrigley said.

Because of the strides the MSG-3 has already made in requirements the team will begin running dry runs on the different maintenance events. The first, a minor isochronal inspection, will be completed at Westover (Mass.) Air Reserve Base in August. In April of 2009, Robins will complete a dry run for the PDM cycle.

"We are doing this to make sure what we have written can be accomplished," Mr. Alford said.