APRIL 2016 | 23 Pride on the ‘line shack’ Out on the flight line, U.S. Navy airman Ashlee Skelly relishes the dirty work of maintaining aircraft—wiping down struts, servicing oils, fueling—and has the dust on her arms to prove it. With the Navy for nearly two years, Skelly started out on the “line shack” as part of a team that tends to the aircraft as they return to and launch from the flight line. She developed her skills supporting the P-8A Poseidon. The Navy, together with Boeing, is taking steps to help future airmen refine their skills even before they get to a flight line. Not far from the Navy’s Integrated Training Center at Naval Air Station Jacksonville, in Florida, Boeing is building an on-base Maintenance facility to teach Navy personnel more than 1,000 maintenance procedures it will need to support the P-8A. Students will learn everything here, starting with training courseware in the “electronic” classroom and then moving on to do their “lab sections” using interactive Virtual Maintenance Trainers, said Boeing’s Sandy McPherson, whose team has been working on the facility for nearly two years. To complement the virtual trainers, Boeing is building a series of hands-on devices—a combination of fabricated parts and actual pieces of real airplanes—to mimic life-size areas of the P-8A. The goal is to aid students’ situational awareness, she explained. “People don’t really understand how big some of these things are until you stand next to them,” McPherson said of the mocked-up parts. They are all fabricated to look and feel real to help students get used to how much space they actually have to work, she said, so they can avoid bumping their elbows or heads. In a hangar at the back of the facility, a Boeing team is mocking up what resembles a P-8A in its entirety. It’s an ordnance load trainer, complete with a full weapons bay, where students will practice loading and unloading Harpoon missiles weighing 650 pounds (300 kilograms) and torpedoes. In another room, an avionics bay mock-up—held up by pylons so the height from the ground is the same as it would be with a real aircraft—students can practice removing and installing boxes that, save for their metal connector handles, have been 3-D printed as well as weighted to simulate the real parts’ center of gravity. Many of the parts throughout the facility are 3-D printed. They include antennas, electronic controls, the aircraft’s radar ball, rotary launchers for the sonobuoys—even a fully 3-D printed auxiliary power unit. The team couldn’t buy a real one, McPherson said, because it would have cost over a million dollars, used. Besides, McPherson said, “If they break it or drop it, we can print them another one.” •
Frontiers April 2016 Issue
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