Air Force Engineers Repair a Battle-Damaged A-10 From Their Bedrooms
Like most Americans, Air Force engineers are working from home to help “flatten the curve.”
A battle damaged A-10 Warthog needed a fix to keep it flying safely, but the team couldn’t assemble in person to fix it.
Instead, the engineers worked from home to study the damage and come up with a fix.
A battle-damaged A-10 Warthog was successfully repaired by an engineering team that came up with a repair solution without ever seeing the plane, let alone meeting together in person. The engineers, from the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center at Hill Air Force Base, were tasked to fix a bullet hole in the plane’s underbelly. The hole was apparently the result of enemy action over the course of a recent mission.
One problem: the engineers were all working from home and couldn’t assemble to physically inspect the plane. The aircraft is described as being at a “deployed location,” likely meaning Afghanistan. Not only was the plane thousands of miles away, the engineering team was all under shelter-in-place orders that had them working from home.
Rather than put the repair off until the pandemic was over, the team worked remotely from “bedrooms, basements, and home offices,” the Air Force explains. The team used VPNs, emails, and phone calls to study the damage and communicate with the forward-deployed aircraft maintainers.
The team decided it needed more detail about the damage and directed maintainers on how to proceed. “After cutting a 3-inch hole in the underbelly, a crack in the structure with three (3) sheared fasteners was found, along with the bullet lodged in the fuel cell cavity floor crack.”
The engineering team sent the maintainers their repair recommendations. After the plane was fixed it was studied and declared airworthy. The plane will be permanently repaired when it returns to its home base in the U.S.
The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the U.S. military in a variety of ways, including sickening troops and forcing the cancellation of training and exercises. Adversity forces innovation, and remote collaboration like this could become a model for the future even long after the pandemic is over. Experts can lend their expertise halfway across the world without leaving their bedrooms, fixing expensive equipment without the cost and trouble of sending them overseas.
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