First cycle of B-2 repairs bring praise

  • Published
  • By Bill Orndorff
  • 309th Maintenance Wing
HILL AIR FORCE BASE, Utah --  In February 2000, the then-Aircraft Directorate launched an "advanced composite repair capability" to support work on portions of the B-2 Spirit aircraft. That launch also started what would be nearly nine years of government and industry partnering.

The result? The 575th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron -- the 309th Aircraft Maintenance Group's successor to the Aircraft Directorate's Technical Repair Division -- and its industry partner, Northrop Grumman, successfully completed the first cycle of programmed depot maintenance when they refurbished flight control surfaces for B-2 ship set No. 21 in December 2008.

"With this partnering initiative, Northrop Grumman and Hill Air Force Base have shared in the opportunities, in the responsibility and the accountability to answer customer demands, and we've shared in the success," said Jim Yerke, 575th AMXS director. "We have significantly reduced the risk of disruption to our production facility in the future because of the foundation, improvements in infrastructure, facilities and equipment, personnel investment in training and our relationship with our customers. We've built the business by doing exceptionally well."

The workload was transitioned to Hill after the Northrop Grumman facility at Pico Rivera, Calif., stopped refurbishing composites. With it came employees; X-ray machines; special tools; a shearography booth, designed to scan composite parts and show defects in the composite material; and a 45-foot long, 15-foot wide autoclave, used to bake and bond the composite parts at temperatures reaching 700 degrees.

A B-2 ship set includes 11 flight control surfaces and two large composite panels and involves 413 end-item components, and is refurbished for the Northrop Grumman plant at Palmdale, Calif.

"When an aircraft lands at Palmdale, the flight controls are taken off and shipped to Hill," said Randy Glanville, Northrop Grumman engineer and site lead. "The ship set that is removed is replaced with the last ship set we refurbished, so following the schedule is extremely important to make the customer's due date. We've done a good job of meeting the Palmdale need dates."

From the beginning, the program had five goals: prepare Building 238 to support a composites workload; build employee skills in composites work; adapt Building 238 for future composites work; establish a partnership between government and private industry; and deliver the completed product.

Meeting the goals involved changes in work habits as well as work areas.

"We essentially started the facility by having the technicians that were trained at Pico Rivera use the exact same tools we had to begin with," said John Wiegel, a Northrop Grumman engineer who has been with the partnership from the beginning. "During the eight years and 10 months it took to get to this final goal, we've upgraded those tools and equipment. When technicians and supervisors have suggestions, or there is something that's new and improved out there, we try to get it and help them perform their job better. We look at it as an excellent opportunity to build up a better equipment base. It helps posture our building for future statements of work."

The partnership has since been recognized as a Center of Excellence for Composites Technology by the Department of Defense and Secretary of the Air Force.

The Process Improvement concept has guided the partnership from the beginning. Originally, the area that would become the composites facility was a large open building with bare concrete floors. The secure area now has marked spaces for equipment, following LEAN principles, better lighting and clean rooms. A separate air handling system was installed to keep airborne contaminates from other shops out of the composites process.

Before the work started employees had to be trained to work on a different type of composite -- they were used to a metallic skin with a honeycomb core instead of the lighter, specially coated material that gives the aircraft its low-observability status. Training was at the Pico Rivera plant working shoulder-to-shoulder with Northrop Grumman employees.

Cecil Funtanilla, who now does inspections for the squadron, started working in sheet metal, shooting rivets, in 1997. He remembers Northrop Grumman employees coming to Hill and looking at their operation and listing what skills the government employees needed.

"I went down (to Pico Rivera) and they were all good to me even though they knew that the government was taking their jobs," Funtanilla said. "I made a lot of friends in California, and a lot of them came up here. Many were dedicated to the B-2 and were more concerned about the fate of the aircraft than changing to another job."

Now, the skilled employees are seeing a reverse process -- Palmdale employees are asking the Hill workers how they do certain tasks.

"We're providing feedback, not just to them, we're providing it for the warfighter," Wiegel said. "Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., (where the aircraft is based) is also calling and asking us how to repair a certain item on the aircraft as well. We're getting and sharing a wealth of knowledge between everybody that's involved in the B-2."

And to meet the needs of the growing composites industry, the Davis Applied Technology College in Kaysville is offering Composites Materials Technician courses for high school and adult students.

"One reason that had to occur is we could very well find ourselves unprepared as we try to compete for those resources unless we grow that composite knowledge throughout the process," Yerke said. "That partnership with DATC in developing those composite courses allows us to have a qualified teacher and increase the skilled workforce. Most of the students actually get picked up as workers before graduation."

The work is gaining recognition such that the partnership is being asked to help with additional solutions.

In 2003, a significant modification improved the functionality of the nozzle bay doors. A repair team, made up of engineers and technicians from the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, the 575th and Northrop Grumman, improved the doors' design, replacing the original material with composite plies that were bonded onto the material in the autoclave. The work ensured the bond between the composite seal and the door's parent material remained secure, and reduced the need for regular inspection.

The redesign and modification ended up being one-sixth the cost that would have occurred over the next 20 years had the modification not taken place. Since then, the AFRL has asked the partnership to work in advance and build a new skin as a possible replacement for the aircraft's hot trailing edges.

The partnership, which now includes six Northrop Grumman and 40 government employees, is flexible enough to handle additional B-2 related work. Called "Drop-In Workload," these items are additional components not included in the baseline PDM refurbishment statement of work. Items include wingtips, leading edges, doors, panels, internal ducting and "new build" requests.

"One of the keys to the success of this partnership -- it's the most advanced partnership I've seen by far on this center and Air Force wide -- is how well we work with each other," Yerke said. "It's the talent that has been drawn into focus as far as the work force, and also the support staff of Northrop Grumman -- their expertise on the engineering side when we come into these difficult situations, how to resolve the newest errors. We have the infrastructure, the talent, the training and the staff to do so. We have support functions, engineering, and the material support side from Northrop Grumman. If we need it, we have it."

With the change of workload, from metallics to composites, employees have also become excited about composites.

"In fact, when you get new programs or new projects in here that are short term, we have guys come up and volunteer and say 'I want to do that,'" Glanville said. "We were looking at nozzle bay doors and we had guys that were clamoring to work on them. It's something different.

It's actually forming things and creating items from pre-preg material (a reinforcing or molding material, such as paper or cloth, already impregnated with a synthetic resin) into pliable, useable components."

Work on the B-2 is to continue through 2058, and future workloads will include composites on the F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning joint strike fighter.

"Partnering is probably one of the smartest things we could have come up with," Glanville said. "In partnering, we all work together for the end product. By listening to each other and learning from each other, we can come up with a system to support the customer. The bottom line is, warfighters need the parts to fly, and we want to make sure they get them."