Small unit takes on big test

  • Published
  • By James Coburn
  • 37th Training Wing Public Affairs
LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE, Texas (AFPN) --  The responsibility for testing the airworthiness of modified KC-135 Stratotankers rests with a small unit here.

The 23-person 313th Flight Test Flight, an Air Force Reserve Command unit, is certifying the Stratotankers, following programmed depot maintenance and a new avionics upgrade.

“We accomplish an elevated-risk mission, which is unlike any other mission in the Air Force,” said Lt. Col. Tim Kinnaird, 313th FLTF’s commander. “Our basic mission is to verify the airworthiness of the airplanes before they go back to the operational Air Force and to basically … accept them back into the Air Force from a civilian contractor.”

The test flight has offices at the Boeing Aerospace Support Center at nearby Kelly USA, where Boeing workers overhaul or modify the aircraft. About 70 percent of the flight’s people are full-time reservists and 30 percent are traditional part-time reservists.

Workers spend about eight months on each KC-135 to completely overhaul the aircraft under a Department of Defense contract. Avionics upgrades take about two months.

The unit’s workload more than doubled in 2003 when it began certifying KC-135s following avionics upgrades, said Lt. Col. Matt Tyykila, the flight’s operations officer. He said the flight expects to certify about 45 avionics-upgraded aircraft each year, as well as about 20 aircraft after depot maintenance.

Colonel Tyykila said the flight receives about one KC-135 each week from the avionics upgrade program, and it takes “two days at the most” to certify the aircraft for return to the operational Air Force.

After the longer depot maintenance, it takes two to five days to certify those aircraft, because they have not been flown for eight months, the colonel said. Like a car that has been in storage, aircraft systems, especially seals in the fuel system, tend to malfunction from not being used.

Colonel Tyykila, one of the flight’s three navigators, said flight members do a lot of pre-checks on the ground before flying the plane. If they find something amiss, they tell Boeing workers.

“We don’t turn the wrenches,” he said. “We check as it goes through the air that everything is performing as it was designed to.”

Colonel Kinnaird, one of the 313th’s nine pilots, said that while flying a newly overhauled aircraft is a bit risky, flight crews do not face many emergencies.

“We deal with a lot that’s not quite right,” he said, “and what we try to do is give back to the operational community the best product we can.”

During airworthiness checks, crewmembers check the engines, check controllability and take the aircraft through its paces, Colonel Tyykila said.

“We’ll typically go from here to west Texas, (to) El Paso, then turn around and come back,” he said of the two-and-a-half-hour round trip.

He said the pilots even shut down the engines, one by one, and start them back up again.

“It’s an emergency procedure, but we do it all the time,” the colonel said.

He said the KC-135E model can fly on two of its four jet engines, while the R model can fly on just one engine.

The boom operator ensures the refueling arm functions properly.

When the crew returns here, they perform several approaches and check different systems, such as avionics, during touch-and-go landings, Colonel Tyykila said.

Colonel Kinnaird said the flights test pilots are not the Chuck Yeager-type who venture into a flight envelope that has never been done.

“We’re testing a known quantity,” he said. “We know very specifically the operational limits of the aircraft, systems and flight envelope. If the aircraft is not capable of achieving or attempts to exceed a known limit, we make sure it’s fixed properly, giving the warfighter a fully mission-capable aircraft.” (Courtesy of Air Education and Training Command News Service)