O-Level Reform: Lemoore Strike Fighter Squadrons Returning More Jets to Flight Line

LEMOORE,
Calif. — Two Navy Super Hornet squadrons at Naval Air Station (NAS) Lemoore,
California, have reduced maintenance turnaround times and are boosting aircraft
readiness as part of naval aviation’s maintenance reform initiatives under the
Naval Sustainment System (NSS).

The NSS
initiative leverages best practices from commercial industry to help reform
aspects of naval aviation’s fleet readiness centers, organizational-level
(O-level) maintenance, supply chain, engineering, and maintenance organizations
and governance processes. Initially, the NSS is concentrating on getting the
Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet fleet healthy before rolling out the approach to every
Navy and Marine Corps aircraft.

Strike
Fighter Squadrons (VFA) 22 and 122 were the first to implement O-level
maintenance reforms following visits from commercial aviation consultants in
December and January.

Reforms
include assigning crew leads to manage the maintenance on each aircraft and
reorganizing hangar spaces, parts cages and tools.

Squadrons Empower Petty Officers

The most
significant change has been the delegation of ownership over each aircraft in
for repairs from the squadrons’ maintenance material control officers, or
MMCOs, to individual crew leads comprised mostly of first-class petty officers.

Traditionally,
MMCOs must keep track of the status of each aircraft in for maintenance as well
as the Sailors working on them, and that’s in addition to deciding what
maintenance actions are required for each jet and which aircraft are safe to
release for flight. Assigning junior-level crew leads to each jet removes some
of that burden from the MMCOs and has led to improved communication and
increased accountability.

“The crew
leads are not making the maintenance decisions; that’s still done by the
maintenance controllers, but what it allows for is it sheds those maintenance
control chiefs of having to know every status of every jet, of every person,
all day long,” said Lt. Cmdr. Brandon Michaelis, O-level reform champion for
Commander, Naval Air Forces (CNAF). “So they can focus on releasing safe
aircraft by empowering those first-class petty officers, who can now own that
process and know where the people are, know the status of the parts, and brief
that up the line.”

For the
petty officers accustomed to doing their job a certain way, reform did not come
easy. But the benefits have been evident, said Aviation Electronics Technician
1st class Victor Perez, the leading petty officer for VFA-122’s avionics shop
and one of the squadron’s selected crew leads.

“At first
the changes didn’t feel productive, because we didn’t really understand it, but
now that we’ve had some time with it, it’s definitely helped improve our
processes and communication,” Perez said.

Used to
focusing exclusively on avionics, Perez said serving as a crew lead has forced
him to approach the maintenance of his assigned aircraft more holistically. The
increased responsibility of bringing an entire jet back online ultimately leads
to a greater sense of accomplishment, he said.

“You get
kind of personal with an aircraft,” he added. “Some aircraft are easy, and some
are a struggle to get through. Rather than working on a jet for a couple hours
to complete the one thing assigned to your shop and then moving on to the next
jet, this way you take more ownership toward completing the whole thing.”

In some
cases, exceptional second-class petty officers have also been considered for
crew lead, including Aviation Electrician’s Mate 2nd Class Michaela Zadra, a
member of VFA-22’s quality assurance division. Having crew leads that can focus
on individual jets — and communicate with the various maintenance shops —
relieves maintenance control from having to keep near-constant track of as many
as a dozen aircraft at a time, Zadra said.

“Crew
leads have cut down on empty communication, so now I, as a maintainer who is
not stuck behind a maintenance control desk, can walk around to each shop and
talk to them personally,” she said. “There’s a lot more communication
one-on-one, instead of one-to-one-to-one and then to maintenance control. It’s
definitely helped with communication and productivity with the jets.”

In tandem
with the crew lead concept has been the utilization of a whiteboard alongside
each aircraft that informs anyone passing by as to the jet’s status.
Information on the boards includes the names of the crew chief and additional
personnel assigned to the aircraft, what maintenance is needed, and the
expected completion date.

“If you
physically walk through one of our hangars today, you can tell which ones have
been reformed and which ones haven’t,” said Vice Adm. DeWolfe H. Miller III,
CNAF. “You know the exact status of that airplane, you know who’s working on
that airplane and when they expect that airplane to be up. There’s going to be
a crew lead who has that ownership.”

In
addition, the two squadrons have begun treating the spaces around each Super
Hornet in their hangars as dedicated workspaces, with all necessary tools and
parts kept beside the aircraft rather than back in one of the various
maintenance shops.

“We’re now
treating the airplane a little more, as an analogy, like a patient getting
surgery,” Miller said. “I am the doctor as the maintainer, and I said,
‘scalpel,’ and my tool is right there. What we’re seeing with that sort of
approach, having our tools next to the airplane, having our status board next
to the airplane, everything is going to the point of action being around that
airframe, and we’re seeing a really significant improvement in our mission
capable rates.”

Both
squadrons have also begun keeping larger parts in a centralized “parts cage” in
the hangar, dramatically reducing the amount of time Sailors spend traversing
the hangar in search of equipment rather than with their hands on an aircraft.

“It may be
five minutes here or five minutes there, but over the course of a day across
all those technicians, that’s a lot of time saved by having those parts close
to where the job is being done,” Michaelis said.

The 84-Day Corrosion Inspection

Together,
the changes have helped the squadrons achieve one of the first goals of O-level
reform — reducing the turnaround time for routine 84-day corrosion inspections
down from 10-14 days to three days.

The 84-day
inspection, so called because Super Hornets receive one every 84 days, is one
of the most common checks conducted on the jet and is officially supposed to
take three days.

“Our
average is about 10 to 14 days,” Miller said. “It’s really important for us to
put some discipline into achieving these checks on a predictable three-day
pattern.”

After
meeting with consultants, VFA-22 was the first squadron to pilot reforms aimed
at reducing the 84-day inspection time.

“They were
able to do it in two-and-a-half shifts, and as we’ve been going through the
process with other squadrons, we realize that yes, three days in itself is
sufficient, once we weed out the inefficiencies,” said Lt. Hasely Clarke,
assistant maintenance officer for Strike Fighter Wing Pacific.

Clarke
said many of those inefficiencies arose from work centers waiting on one
another to be finished with an aircraft before beginning their own tasks.
“There was a lot of waiting time in between,” he said.

Time
management, communication and multitasking between shops have all improved
following the O-level reform, Zadra said, noting shops were encouraged to
identify which of their tasks could be performed alongside another’s
simultaneously. For instance, Zadra said she can check the lights in the
cockpit from the side of the jet while someone from the avionics shop inspects
instrumentation inside the cockpit.

“It cuts
down a lot on worker hours, so we can minimize the time on the inspection,” she
said.

Initial Skepticism

A former
MMCO, Michaelis said he was skeptical of the O-level reforms when they were
initially proposed, but has come around after seeing how VFA-22 and VFA-122
have put the reforms into practice.

“It’s been
a tough pill to swallow, to see how inefficient even when I was in that
position, even though I thought we were on point every single time,” he said.
“To now look back and go, ‘Wow, there were a lot of places where I could have
improved.’ So, that’s what’s made me a believer, is being able to look in
hindsight and realize there’s tons of this stuff that I wish I had when I was
an MMCO.”

Michaelis
said the plan is to take the reforms to VFA squadrons at NAS Oceana, Virginia,
before rolling them out across the Super Hornet community and, ultimately, to
other platforms.

“As we
migrate this and expand it across all type-model-series, I’m excited about what
this is going to do for our future,” Miller said.

Further
evidence of the reform’s efficacy will come when squadrons can keep their
Sailors on normal work schedules while preparing for deployments, Michaelis
said.

“Before we go on detachments or on deployment, we often work Sailors 12 [hours] on, 12 off, sometimes seven days a week,” he said. “The proof is when, on a Thursday, we can let our people out for a three-day weekend because our jets are up and ready to go, and we saw that recently in one of our transformed squadrons.”