Quality Assurance: Maintenance commander's 'eyes and ears'

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Benjamin Stratton
  • 379th Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs
SOUTHWEST ASIA (AFNS) --  To ensure the safety of pilots and ground crews, aircraft maintainers are held to a high standard of proficiency and job knowledge in fulfilling their mission requirements.

Their skills are monitored and inspected regularly by some of the career field's most knowledgeable maintainers.

"We cultivate a foundation of safety and compliance by providing leadership and subject matter experts an assessment detailing the proficiency and quality of maintenance personnel," said Master Sgt. Christopher Wilson, the 379th Expeditionary Maintenance Group's quality assurance chief inspector.

With 14 inspectors from 12 bases across five major commands, the quality assurance teams are responsible for training and inspecting the more than 1,100 maintainers on five different airframes.

QA evaluates the quality of maintenance accomplished and performs necessary functions to manage the wing and group's Maintenance Standardization Evaluation Program, Wilson said. The MSEP provides an objective sampling of the quality of equipment, the proficiency of maintenance personnel, and the compliance of lead command and unit MSEP focus areas, programs and processes.

"Maintenance is dynamic here," Wilson said. "With so many Airmen coming from so many different organizations and major commands, it's truly a testament to the effectiveness of the total-force integration concept."

He said QA manages four main programs for the wing. These include technical order distribution for all the maintenance units across the wing, production improvement management, the maintenance standardization and evaluation program, and the wing foreign object damage and dropped object prevention programs.

The 379th EMXG's QA shop is responsible for maintenance Airmen here along with others across five forward operating locations in the U.S. Central Command's area of responsibility.

"As updates to technical orders come down from the major command and higher headquarters, we work with every joint task force agency across the AOR to get them the TOs they need to complete their missions," said Master Sgt. Kevin Nolan, the 379th EMXG QA production improvement manager.

QA serves as the primary technical advisory agency in the maintenance organization, assisting maintenance supervision at all levels to resolve quality problems. The evaluation and analysis of deficiencies and problem areas are key functions of QA that highlight and identify underlying causes of poor quality in the maintenance production effort.

The team's inspections in the maintenance shops allow production improvement managers to develop trend analysis reports that evaluate deficiencies and malfunctions within the job or processes.

"These reports allow us to analyze what caused the malfunction and figure out how to fix it for the future," Nolan said. "By finding these errors we're able to save the Air Force money."

As the inside experts working in the field, it's also QA's responsibility to brief the 379th EMXG commander.

"We're the maintenance group commander's eyes and ears across every maintenance facility on base," Wilson said. "We make sure the 379th EMXG are the best and proudest professionals in the Grand Slam Wing."