Kadena personnel bank $10,000 for ingenuity

  • Published
  • By Airman 1st Class Maeson L. Elleman
  • 18th Wing Public Affairs
KADENA AIR BASE, Japan (AFNS) --  Undersecretary of the Air Force Erin Conaton urged anyone employed by the U.S. federal government to search for and identify any areas that could cut wasteful spending, according to a message published in July 2011.

"Over the past two years, 56,000 ideas have been submitted through the Securing Americans Value and Efficiency (SAVE) initiative," Conaton said in the message. "I am proud to say many ideas were submitted by our Airmen. I again encourage your participation. You have day-to-day visibility into opportunities to eliminate non-value added activity and wasted resources. In these challenging fiscal times, every dollar counts and every good idea matters."

This is a philosophy eloquently expressed by the actions of two innovative people on Kadena Air Base.

Tech. Sgt. Richard Vaden, an 18th Civil Engineer Squadron heavy equipment operator, and retired Air Force Chief Master Sgt. Stephen Tucker, an 18th Maintenance Group Air Force engineering technical services lead and propulsion equipment specialist, recently received a big pay out of $10,000 each for their ideas that saved the Air Force thousands of dollars in equipment and man-hours each year.

The two innovators didn't peruse the base looking for ways to save money and improve efficiency; rather, they took initiative and saw opportunities right in their own work stations.

Vaden saw not just an excruciatingly long process, he saw a safety issue.

Each time aircraft wheels make contact with the runway during approach and landing, they leave rubber deposits on the airstrip. Over time, the deposits build up and cause the runway to become extremely slippery and greatly reduce pilot visibility of the centerline -- issues that could lead to exceedingly dangerous situations.

In order to mitigate the risk, Kadena AB's 18th CES Airmen frequently get down and dirty, often shutting down the runway for hours at a time to scrub the rubber off the flightline.

However, the process is no quick fix.

"This is a very time-consuming process and it also involves numerous personnel and scheduling impediments," said Vaden. "Furthermore, this process requires all air operations for that particular runway to be suspended ... because the process makes the runway extremely slippery for a sustained period of time, preventing aircraft from landing safely."

That's why Vaden developed an initiative through the Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st Century program using a high-pressure water unit to blast away the rubber deposits, saving the Air Force roughly $277,000 annually on both supplies and man-hours. For his proposal, Vaden earned the large reward from the Air Force Innovative Development through Employee Awareness, or IDEA, program.

Similar to Vaden, Tucker also noticed a way to save money right in his own shop.

Tucker worked on the F100-PW-220 and '229 engines, belonging to the F-15 Eagle and F-16 Fighting Falcon respectively, since he first enlisted in the late 1970s.

Two years ago while he was still stationed at Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho, Tucker said technicians there noticed a steady increase in faults registered by the troubleshooting device for the engines.

Essentially, a major issue for technicians came from a discrepancy between two different devices designed to perform diagnostics for the engines in order for them to run at peak performance.

"There was an increase in these faults," said Tucker. "When we downloaded the engine and looked at it, it drove us to the troubleshooting tree. When we started going through the troubleshooting tree, that's when we realized there was problem with the way it was being troubleshot."

Using his decades of experience, Tucker found the computer diagnostic systems were determining engine errors in the wrong places, leading to a proverbial wild goose chase.

"The tree had you checking parameters that were not indicative of this fault," he said. "You could troubleshoot it all day long and never duplicate this problem."

At the time, Air Force procedure directed the Airmen working on the equipment to push the engines to "military power" -- full power just below afterburner -- for three full minutes, which burns roughly 10,000 pounds of fuel per hour. With that much thrust on the line, Airmen either had to take the engine to the trim pad or "hush house" to tie the engine down, meaning the procedure wasted both fuel and man-hours.

"I started to do some investigation to see if we could do it at a different power setting," said Tucker. "On the flightline, we could run the engines at 80 percent power without any tie downs or towing it anywhere; you could do it right there on the spot. If you went to military power, you would have to tow the airplane to a different location and go through a lot more procedures in order to do that engine run.

"At 80 percent power, you're only burning 2,500 pounds of fuel per hour, so you realize about a 75 percent reduction in fuel consumption," he continued. "When we ran the engine at military power, we would run it for three minutes and record the temperature. Instead, we recommended running it at 80 percent power for one minute."

Tucker said running the jet engines at the new power setting saved the Air Force roughly $89,000 in fuel and man-hours.

Tucker moved to Kadena AB in September 2010, but it took nearly two more years to finish changing the procedure with Air Force technical orders. Once the results came through, Tucker submitted the data through the Air Force IDEA program on Kadena AB in February 2012, much like Vaden.

Both Vaden and Tucker are advocates for the program, saying anyone with the means to improve the Air Force's efficiency should submit through IDEA.

"Anyone who knows a more efficient way to complete a process should definitely complete this process," said Vaden. "As the Air Force is continuing to look for areas to save money, we should be good stewards of what we are entrusted to and seek ways to improve upon the same."

Air Force personnel who would like to submit a cost savings initiative can contact their base AFSO21 or IDEA program office for more information.