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MacDill inspectors ensure mission, safety don't slip through cracks

  • Published
  • By Airman 1st Class Ned T. Johnston
  • 6th Air Mobility Wing Public Affairs
MACDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. --  Preventative maintenance inspections are the name of the game when it comes to nondestructive inspection technicians. It's their job to detect discontinuities in aircraft parts before they can become a big enough problem to jeopardize the mission.

The NDI Airmen with the 6th Maintenance Squadron here have a supersized mission when compared to other NDI shops.

"We have one of the biggest areas of responsibility for any NDI shop I've ever heard of," said Staff Sgt. Dustin Harris, 6th MXS NDI technician. "The closest shop from here is in Cape Canaveral, some 150 miles away."

The 6th NDI Airmen are responsible for MacDill and all of its tenant units, as well as the Army Reserve's 5th Batallion-159th Aviation Regiment, and the Coast Guard Air Station Clearwater.

"In one year we're tasked with roughly 350 jobs, with PMIs being the majority of the work load," said Harris. "So just about every day we're doing some sort of PMI-related job."

Like clockwork, the 6th NDI Airmen started off early Nov. 26, 2013. Harris received a job from the 310th Airlift Squadron to perform an inspection on the main landing gear wheel hubcap assembly for a Gulfsteam G550 aircraft.

So Harris, equipped with a Nortec 2000D+ Eddy Current Flaw Detector, walked over to Hangar 4 to begin his hunt for potential mission jeopardizing faults.

"The process of conducting this inspection is fairly simple," said Harris. "You could teach anyone to perform our inspections, but it takes a trained eye to know a flaw when your instruments display one."

The "Eddy" induces an alternating magnetic field on the test object, which if uninterrupted, flows horizontally without break on the display screen.

"It's like throwing a rock in a body of water," said Harris. "The probe produces the magnetic field, which in this case would be the rock. When I push the probe up against the test object, it acts as a rock creating ripples in the water. The Eddy then picks up those ripples, and if there is a break or crack in the object, it is detected on a display as a vertical indication."

For today, this wheel hubcap assembly passed its inspection and goes on to fly another day, but for Harris, the hunt never ends.