CHARLESTON AIR FORCE BASE, S.C. –
The 437th Maintenance Squadron Home Station Check Airmen hosted a rapid improvement lean event here from Aug. 6 to Aug. 10 to increase aircraft availability and reduce total cost for Charleston AFB.
HSC is a thorough three-day inspection done every 120 days on an aircraft while it's at home station. Flightline maintenance begins this process by preparing the aircraft for a wash. Then, a wash contractor cleans the aircraft at the wash rack and it is later towed to the HSC hangar for the start of the inspection process. After the inspections and repairs in HSC, it's towed back to the flightline for engine runs. Once the entire process is complete, the C-17 is "sold back" or given back to the aircraft maintenance squadron and scheduled for its next flight.
Before this lean event, the entire HSC process took 101 hours to complete. However, the overall goal of this event was to cut the total time down to 58 hours, or two-and-a-half days per aircraft. During this event, the lean team was able to cut 11 hours out of the overall process. The lean team has action plans to cut down the rest of the hours.
To help support this event, specialists came from different bases around the United States. Col. Robert Hamm, 436th Maintenance Group commander from Dover AFB, Del., was the lean facilitator for the event. Dover AFB has made huge strides in lean projects during the past three years and he helped bring their "lean" knowledge to Charleston AFB. Colonel Hamm was instrumental and helped the team set and reach goals during the event.
"Colonel Hamm brought a standard for us to follow," said 1st Lt. Vince Cammarano, 437 MXS Maintenance Flight assistant commander. "He brought a lot to the table and did a great job at leading us in this lean event."
Before the lean event, many things caused waste and generated extra hours because the C-17 was just sitting and not being inspected or repaired. One issue was the way damaged gear doors were handled. Previously, the aircraft structural maintenance shop received the bad gear doors after the aircraft was washed. Repairing bad gear doors was a process that took an average of 42 hours. Now, the doors are removed earlier and this provides aircraft structural maintenance Airmen an additional 14 hours of repair time to provide a non-delayed product for HSC.
"For me, this whole lean event was very educational," said Senior Airman Cory Tash, 437 MXS crew chief. "It was great being able to stand back and look at processes and figure out how to apply improvements."
Other improvements made were the organization and location of tools and machinery throughout the HSC hangar to make them more readily available for Airmen to work on C-17s. Before the process was leaned, Airmen averaged 864 footsteps to get equipment, but now with a different layout of available tools and machinery it only takes 291 steps to keep C-17s readily available.
"The team we worked with was nothing short of tremendous ... there was a great amount of effort from everyone," said Lieutenant Cammarano. "So far, we've saved more than 1,000 hours of aircraft availability to America and to the war fighter."