CHARLESTON AIR FORCE BASE, S.C. –
With the continued downsizing of the Air Force and a never-ending world-wide Global Reach mission, it's obvious that our service needs to find smarter ways to accomplish the mission.
For maintenance members, this means ensuring they continue to do the same quality work in the same amount of time but with less people. This is the nature of the current predicament.
How are they going to do it? Is it even possible?
"Being the assistant maintenance flight commander gives me the opportunity to find that out," said 2nd Lt. Vincent Cammarano, 437th Maintenance Squadron assistant maintenance flight commander. "My flight is currently made up of more than 145 maintainers who conduct an average of 10 home station check inspections on Charleston's C-17s per month."
There are six different types of HSC inspections and they can be either a three-or-four day process. Every aircraft that rolls through the inspection dock is inspected and serviced. Through Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st century, they are finding innovative ways to make this process more fluid and allow mission accomplishment with lower manpower.
One way they've improved flow through the HSC dock is changing how they schedule the aircraft into the dock. They realigned the aircraft flow to maximize manpower use and moved from a seven-day aircraft flow to a more condensed five-day flow. This increased manpower use by 10 percent and reduced average HSC flow hours from 122 hours to 75 hours. Along with better manpower use, they are also finding ways to quickly repair the discrepancies that are found.
"During HSC inspections we began to see the same discrepancies time and time again," said Lieutenant Cammarano.
This allowed them to develop methods and expedite repairs. Through a cooperative initiative with the 437th Logistics Readiness Squadron, they developed parts kits that allow aircraft to be repaired quicker. By stocking all of the parts and tools in the HSC dock, the amount of time a repair can take is significantly reduced. For example, the flap bracket and main landing gear uplock kits can save between eight and 12 hours per aircraft.
"In HSC, we will continue to find ways to eliminate waste and streamline aircraft flow," said Lieutenant Cammarano.
With Air Mobility Command's future initiative of regionalizing HSCs for all east coast bases at one location, a streamlined and smoother aircraft inspection flow will be more crucial than ever.