PHOTOS: (Above) After a second successful flight, Phantom Eye touches down on its newly redesigned landing gear system on the lakebed of NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in Cailfornia. (Inset) Ed Nowakowski, left, and Mike Knoble, both on the F/A-18 landing gear team, with the landing gear of a Super Hornet. BOEING FRONTIERS / APRIL 2013 17 tribute to teamwork across Boeing. The landing was “spectacularly benign,” said Boeing Technical Fellow Eric Reichenbach, a member of the Phantom Eye team. Benign, but highly successful. “With this flight, we further validated Phantom Eye’s ability to provide a persistent eye in the sky,” said Drew Mallow, Phantom Eye program manager. “It took a dedicated team to reach this milestone. Colleagues from across the company shared their time and knowledge to make this test a success.” Although they were not part of Phantom Eye’s original landing gear team, Knoble and Nowakowski have been working on landing gear for a number of aircraft, including the F/A-18 Hornet, F-15 Eagle, AV-8B Harrier II and T-45 Goshawk for some 40 years combined. Their experience, together with the expertise of addi-tional F/A-18 landing gear teammates as well as Boeing Research & Technology and Phantom Works colleagues, proved invaluable. The team completed in a few short months a landing gear redesign that otherwise could have taken more than a year, according to Phantom Eye airframe team leader Terry Richardson. Phantom Eye has a unique way of taking off and landing. To reduce weight and increase how long it can remain aloft, Phantom Eye lifts off from a moving launch cart that rolls to a stop after the large unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is airborne. Phantom Eye lands like a glider on a main landing gear skid and a conventional nose landing gear wheel and tire assembly. After Phantom Eye’s first flight in June of last year, Boeing teams quickly went to work to figure out why the nose landing gear broke when it touched down on the desert lakebed. Understanding the urgency to return Phantom Eye to flight testing, the team completed what’s known as the Root Cause Corrective Action process, a Lean+ Element that begins with clearly defining the problem and analyzing and understanding
Frontiers April 2013 Issue
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