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LOG 262, Applied Maintenance Management Concepts, is a two week professional continuing education course offered by the Materiel Management Department at AFIT’s School of Systems and Logistics. It is designed to provide company grade officers, senior NCOs, and civilian equivalents a survey of operations management methods for operational unit aircraft and munitions maintenance. Each year, about six offerings are held at AFIT, and another six are conducted at operational units in the field.

Process improvement is a major theme of the course, and in each offering student teams identify and tackle real-world improvement opportunities from their bases. Although intended to serve as an integrative exercise to reinforce improvement methods and approaches, these exercises also often open the way for significant enhancements to field operations.

In a recent offering held at Hickam AFB HI, a team of C-17 maintainers identified a developing problem with parking ramp utilization and maintenance workarounds. Although spacious, the ramp at Hickam has historically presented challenges with respect to permissible ramp loading due to instability of subsoils. For years, the solution had been to restrict portions of the ramp from various activities; for example, only a few parking locations were designated as suitable for large frame aircraft jacking. With the stand-up of the C-17 unit at Hickam and increased numbers of transient heavy aircraft supporting operations in Southwest Asia, access to these locations was becoming an issue: the C-17 maintainers found themselves forced to tow aircraft several times a week for common maintenance actions such as aircraft tire changes. Although straightforward, aircraft towing presents a problem to field units because it requires a relatively large crew and can therefore interrupt work on several other aircraft.

The student team pursued several alternative approaches to this problem, including researching the civil engineering standards and regulations on ramp loading which had driven the local designation of parking spots. They discovered the policy had been created based on generic standards and did not specifically consider C-17 jacking utilizing the aircraft integral jacking capability and jacking pads. They put together a package incorporating actual load limits based on ramp surface and underlying soils from available civil engineering data, as well as loads associated with various jacking procedures outlined in the C-17 aircraft technical publications. They then worked with the Civil Engineer Squadron and Airfield Management to redesignate several ramp locations as permissible for C-17 integral jacking.

This action eliminated two to four tow operations weekly, thereby speeding aircraft turnarounds, increasing operational flexibility on the flightline, saving 10 to 20 man-hours per week, reducing competition for tow vehicles, lessening coordination requirements between maintainers and the control tower, and reducing the hazard of “dinging” an aircraft—all without cost to the Air Force.

In this case, as in others, the LOG 262 class provided the time away from immediate production needs, a few methods and guidelines, and an improvement forum; the students provided all of the leadership, ideas, and leg work. Similar LOG 262-sponsored teams have posted successes such as initiating joint Air Force-Navy calibration of torque wrenches at Misawa, working with the Operations Group and the Fire Department to develop hot-pit fueling procedures for F-22 aircraft at Nellis, and collaborating with the Logistics Readiness Squadron to streamline deferred discrepancy parts handling and scheduling at Dover. Each of these successful improvement efforts is a testament to the ability of Air Force professionals to achieve significant improvements when given the opportunity to do so.