Warfighter shares perspective of AEDC's contribution to the fight

  • Published
  • By Philip Lorenz III
  • AEDC/PA
Arnold Air Force Base, Tenn. --  Those attending the most recent Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) Technical Excellence Seminar heard how Arnold impacts the warfighter from someone who knows about this firsthand. 
Air National Guardsman Senior Master Sgt. John Kelly, the guest speaker for the March event, joined AEDC's contractor work force as a project engineer in 2003. He recently shifted to the U.S. Navy civil service as a project manager with the 717th Test Squadron. 
In addition to his full time duties at AEDC, Kelly has also served as traditional guardsman in the role of a production superintendent with the 180th Fighter Wing [out of Toledo, Ohio] on deployments to Qatar in 2005 and Balad Airbase in 2007 and 2008 in support of Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. 
Prior to joining the Air National Guard, Kelly served eight years as an active-duty F-16 hydraulics and engine mechanic and was a crew chief most of that time. 
The Air National Guard production superintendent spoke about his role in the 180th and gave an account of the operations tempo during deployment overseas, showing a sense of humor that was not lost on his audience. 
"This will be more from a maintainer's point of view," he said. "A lot of times at AEDC with our testing and our qualifications we talk a lot about the operator's, the pilot's point of view, we can sum that up in two words, more thrust." 
Kelly said his Air National Guard command's mission of close air support and reconnaissance is greatly enhanced by the past and ongoing ground testing conducted on the F-16's weapons systems at AEDC. 
"The 716th did store separation testing from TERS (triple ejector rack) where they were working with the new smart bombs," he said, recalling a conversation he heard during a recent commander's call. 
Kelly said improved engine reliability can be traced to ground testing and also condition-based maintenance practices honed at Arnold. 
He said an aircraft deployed in the Air Expeditionary Force (AEF), after (400) hours of flight time, must undergo a phase inspection "from nose to tail." 
Kelly said when they are deployed to the AEF the pilots log two to three times the number of flight hours they would typically fly at the home station. 
"That kind of tempo really gets into our maintenance aspect," he said. "Our turn times start to really become important. The turn time is defined as the time that an aircraft comes back in the chocks, shuts down and the time that it's crew ready again. 
"The things that we're doing here at AEDC have a huge effect on our turn times, like for example, inspection intervals," he said. "This is a picture of our engine shop working on one of our aircraft. They're doing a borescope interval and in our AMT (Accelerated Mission Testing) testing we're helping to define some of those inspection intervals. 
"When we deployed to Qatar in 2005, we had a 10-hour, a 50-hour and a 100-hour borescope interval on the engine," he continued. "Since then, it's now to 50 and a 100 hours. So, in Qatar we were doing borescope inspections sometimes daily and at least every other day, now it's expanded to 50 and that's a direct result of some of the testing we've been doing right here in SL-2 and SL-3." 
Kelly said this is an on ongoing process at AEDC and one, which will bring continual improvements. 
Kelly also said he and others are excited about the testing AEDC has been doing since 2006 to evaluate and certify Air Force aircraft on fuels derived from natural gas or coal using the Fischer-Tropsch (FT) process. 
He said another area where AEDC is making a difference for maintainers like him is in the area of computer downloads as engines get more advanced. 
"Now we're able to hook up to the aircraft, do a [computerized data] download after a flight," he said. "It gets us into the troubleshooting tree and gets us (results) quicker. Engine system prognosis is a system that AEDC, AFRL [Air Force Research Laboratory], Oklahoma and engine manufacturers are working on together. 
"It's combining all that information and trying to give us a better idea of how the engine and aircraft systems are (functioning). Instead of having actual engine inspection intervals, it'll determine what type of flying it's been doing and change the inspection intervals depending on the characteristics of the individual engines." 
Kelly sees a positive future ahead. 
"Our world is changing and AEDC enables us on the flight line to stay ahead of that," he said. "We've seen the reliability of the engines improve a lot." 
Lt. Col. Najeeb Ahmed, commander of the 717th Test Squadron, said the kudos for a job well done go both ways. He said Kelly's command record of response times during deployments has been outstanding. 
"The fact that they never missed a sortie generation - that means that every single aircraft they were supposed to generate was on time and wasn't broken and took off as planned - that is unheard of," he said. "An aircraft has millions of moving parts and circuits and integrated parts. For all that to work, consistently, for every single aircraft, for every single sortie that they were supposed to generate, that is remarkable. That's just fantastic. 
"Part of training is to be able to support that type of requirement where you go to war and you're sitting on alert and you have 15 minutes to generate the aircraft and take off, you need to have every single part on that aircraft working. 
"So, the fact that they were able to make every sortie generation rate when they were back home into training, that gives you the confidence that they can meet that 15-minute requirement for air sovereignty loads. It's just I mean that is a statistic I don't think people picked up on. That's remarkable for any squadron in the Air Force."