Forum: F-16 News

31st AMXS merges AMUs

by Senior Airman Sarah Gregory
31st Fighter Wing Public Affairs

4/19/2007 - AVIANO AIR BASE, Italy -- Leading the way in a new Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st Century initiative, Aviano's 31st Maintenance Group has created a whole new way to do business.

In a strategic move that's been in the works since last year, the 555th and 510th Aircraft Maintenance Units will merge into the 31st Aircraft Maintenance Squadron Monday. After the merge, there will no longer be separate AMUs.

The move is in response to a force shaping announcement stating that the 31st AMXS will lose 20 percent of its manpower between 2007 and 2009.

"The 31st AMXS needed to figure out how we could continue to produce combat sorties if we had 20 percent less of our people than we do now," said Senior Master Sgt. Jeffrey Hamilton, 31st MXS maintenance flight chief. "We are also getting three additional aircraft. Our inventory is going to go from 48 to 51 jets and we are only manned for 42."

The concept of the AMU merger spawned from an initial AFSO 21 event in April 2006 when U.S. Air Forces in Europe asked Aviano for suggestions on ways to become more efficient. A team was put together to analyze AMU operations.

The analysis showed both AMUs were wasting time and energy checking tools in and out of their support section.

"We clocked it to see how long it takes for an entire day-shift to check out all their tools. It took anywhere from 40 to 100 minutes before they could even start working and then at the end of the shift they'd bring it all back," explained Sergeant Hamilton. "That was just day-shift - swing and mid-shift has to do the same thing. This happens six times a day, times two AMUs; when we added it up for the number of days a year we fly it was 96,000 man hours wasted."

The man hours wasted is equal to 44 personnel who never actually touch an aircraft - all they do is push tools.

In order to solve the tool movement problem, the maintainers brainstormed ways to get the equipment needed to repair jets to the aircraft faster. The solution was to keep the tools at the point of use and to outfit trucks with tools and equipment so they could respond quickly to aircraft needing immediate attention.

"Basically these rapid response trucks provide an immediate response to any possible grounding circumstance before the aircraft takes off," said Master Sgt. Jeff Eldridge, 31st AMXS specialist section chief. "If the pilot gets any kind of discrepancy before taking off he'll radio the truck expeditor and they respond directly to the pilot and find out what needs to be done."

The rapid response trucks are nothing new to the flightline, however the big difference is the crew will no longer have to report to a centralized support center to pick up tools and equipment - they'll have everything they already need with them.

"It cost about $4,000 to outfit all three trucks and is estimated that it will save an hour a day in transport time," said Tech. Sgt. Charles Arnett, 31st AMXS specialist expediter and specialist truck team chief.

Currently, many of the Air Force's AMUs operate in the similar fashion - each one performing both the daily flying hours and maintenance within their units. The 31st AMXS is designing a new way to do business by separating the flying and maintenance tasks.

"Right now we still have two AMUs and within them, each AMU is responsible for a certain number of aircraft and they do the flying and the maintenance on those aircraft," said Sergeant Eldridge. "What we're doing here is changing that totally around. We're going into one squadron together and separating the work between a flying and a maintenance cell."

The flying cell will only concentrate on completing the tasks associated with flying such as launches, refueling and recovering aircraft and the maintenance cell will focus on all scheduled and unscheduled maintenance.

"With the separate cells, we're redirecting how we do maintenance and how we do the flying," explained Sergeant Eldridge, who said this is the first time in his 20 years of service he's seen something like this. "We'll still do launch and recovery the same way, but instead of having to immediately do maintenance on another aircraft after they've launched one jet, that job will already be taken care of by the maintenance cell. So the guys in the flying cell will be dedicated to nothing but taking care of jets flying."

Overall, the new changes will allow two shifts of workers to continually focus on repairing and maintaining aircraft.

"We're going to be better at fixing airplanes than we've ever been before," Sergeant Hamilton said.

The people in support are there because supervision put them there so blame them. I ran two support sections and I had to put up the "underacheivers", most of them were good people who had personal issues that kept them from perfoming their flightline duties. I myself am a F-16 Crew Chief and I know I can out crew most people on the flightline today. It doesn't take much to be put in support these days alot of peole want a break from the flight and support or snack bar the chocies. And lets talk about the TAS/Barcode system you were talking about. I knew the system as the NCOIC real well and loved it. I ran the support section a Cannon in the 428th and we had 5 people for two support sections (17% manned) with little or no help from the Singaporeans who have even more negitive view of support. You spend 6 month in support and see what it's like on the other side of the counter. See how much people b**** about about you and how slow you are in the tool room. Support is more than just handing out tools, alot more and until you spent some time in support, stop your whining.

and the NCOIC (often as not, also placed in support to get them out of someone else's hair) would come flying out of his office and tell us that we were not to tell his airmen what to do. You could almost set your watch by it, when five minutes later the NCOIC would come back out and tell the airmen to help out at the counter. And no, that is not a hit against any one NCOIC or any one support- I saw it across three bases, three different commands, and seven different support sections.