CHARLESTON AIR FORCE BASE, S.C. –
Team Charleston has once again made its mark in the C-17 community by reducing wasted motion and time in the preflight sequence of events.
A Charleston AFB team has figured out a way to shorten C-17 preflight time by one hour and 30 minutes by focusing on reducing redundancies and eliminating overlap during the aircraft preflight procedures.
The plan is to implement checklist changes at all Air Force bases flying the C-17s, which includes C-17 Air Force Reserve wings and the C-17 Air National Guard unit in Jackson, Miss., with Team Charleston leading the way.
"These changes will make aircrews more efficient with the time they have," said Col. Joseph Mancy, 437th Operations Group deputy commander. "It will increase time available to fly by 10 percent per duty day."
Earlier this year, the sequence of events team held an Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st century meeting to discuss improvements around the base. Col. Steven Harrison, former 437th Airlift Wing vice commander, suggested focusing on the C-17 checklist and reducing redundancy prior to takeoff.
The team reviewed the checklist and found that the 35 steps the pilots were completing in their interior safety inspection checklist could be reduced to 18 steps with the help of the aircraft maintainers; this would allow the current aircraft SOE to be shortened and push towards the goal of reducing the SOE by an hour and 30 minutes.
Previously, maintainers would go through their checklist to put power on the aircraft. The pilots would then arrive at the aircraft and go through their checklist which included some of the same checklist items that were already checked by the maintainers -- this wasted time that could have been used flying.
"By reducing the redundant steps, we will eliminate wasted time and increase productivity," said Lt. Col. Paul Wittsack, 437th Operations Group chief of standards and evaluation. "Since aircraft systems on the C-17 are designed to flag when items fail, do aircraft systems really need to be checked as often as we check them? This is what we're aiming to minimize."
Team Charleston presented this idea at the Flight Manual Review Conference at Long Beach, Calif., in May. The FMRC involved members from Boeing, members from the Systems Group at Wright-Patterson, standardization and evaluation experts from all C-17 Air Force bases, Reservists from different wings and Air National Guard members from Jackson, Miss.
The SOE team is requesting to separate the preflight section of the checklist into two sections: interior safety inspect "power on" and "power off" sections.
The next FMRC meeting is scheduled to be held in August to discuss possible implementation of the changes.