Aircraft maintenance squadron at McConnell launches 'perfect' KC-135

Published Aug. 18, 2010
By Senior Airman Abigail Klein
22nd Air Refueling Wing Public Affairs

MCCONNELL AIR FORCE BASE, Kan. -- Airmen from the 22nd Aircraft Maintenance Squadron launched a "perfect" KC-135 Stratotanker here for the first time in more than 25 years Aug. 10, 2010.

The "perfect" KC-135, aircraft number 63-8022, was recorded as having no deferred discrepancies, meaning that all equipment was fully functional for flight.

"To be able to have all your deferred discrepancies cleared off on an aircraft, you need everything to line up perfect," said Senior Master Sgt. Brian Kruzelnick, 22nd AMXS Assistant Aircraft Maintenance Unit superintendent. "You need to have the manning to work that aircraft, be able to have the downtime on that aircraft and supply all the parts you need to fix it--this gives you the ability to clear all your deferred discrepancies."

McConnell is home to 63 KC-135 Stratotankers. At any given time throughout the year, approximately 20 percent of McConnell's Airmen are deployed worldwide.

This deployment percentage makes this accomplishment even more impressive. The ability of the Airmen to obtain this perfect flight, is directly related to McConnell's health of fleet, said Sergeant Kruzelnick.

"It's extremely rare to ever have a Black Letter Initial," he said. "It's a testament to the drive and aggressive maintenance that all our individuals are doing and not only in AMXS, but across the maintenance group."

The Air Force allows 12.3 discrepancies per airframe -- 10 awaiting maintenance, 2.3 awaiting parts. This means that each KC-135 is allowed up to 12 individual write ups, none of which may be categorized as a safety of flight issue.

The aircraft launched by the 22nd AMXS was clear of all of these discrepancies.

"We went back about 25 years into the base's history -- it has never happened," said Sergeant Kruzelnick. "In order to do it you need whole maintenance group effort to achieve this because any conceivable write up can keep this aircraft from being discrepancy free -- loose knob, small leak or modifications from the Air Force for this aircraft that we don't have can keep an aircraft from being discrepancy free."

Since the aircraft is more than 50 years old, obtaining parts to make the aircraft discrepancy free record is a challenge the maintenance group faces daily.

"This aircraft is getting older and a lot of the companies that carry the parts are not around anymore so we have to resource these parts," said Sergeant Kruzelnick.

This historic event was not lost only on the maintainers. Col. Allan Day, 22nd Maintenance Group commander, also had a few words of acknowledgement for the maintainer's accomplishment.

"It is truly a good day when we can launch all of our aircraft, fully mission configured and ready for wartime tasking, safely on time, but launching aircraft is a team event," said Colonel Day. "While the Airmen from our Maintenance Group get the honor of providing the final touches before these aircraft take flight, proud members from the medical group, mission support group, operations group and director of staff all played a vital role in making this first ever test of our Forward Location Aircraft Generation a success."

The maintainers are proud of their achievement according to Master Sgt. Richard Torla, 22nd AMXS productions superintendent, but also a victory for their supervisors.

"I've never seen one in my career and I've worked three different airframes, it was pretty exciting and gave us a good a sense of accomplishment that this could be done even on this aircraft," said Sergeant Torla. "Some write ups you can carry for a long time waiting on depo so it was a good feeling once we signed off that last write up and prepared it to fly."

As far as what this accomplishment means for the 22nd AMXS, Sergeant Kruzelnick recognizes the challenges that the squadron was able to overcome to break this record.

"We essentially are demonstrating our importance of health of fleet as a group," he said. "For us, it wasn't good enough to have just met the standard that the Air Force presented to us, we took every write up and set of forms personally and if we had a write up, we identified it and worked as aggressively as we could to fix that discrepancy."

On average, some of the KC-135 will spend six to 10 months in the area of responsibility. There are currently 600 Airmen within the 22nd AMXS, not including supply in 22nd Maintenance Operations Squadron and 22nd Maintenance Squadron that also contributed to the aircraft.

"I've never seen one in my career and I've worked three different airframes, it was pretty exciting and it gave us a good sense of accomplishment on such an old aircraft," said Sergeant Torla.