EDMX: handling controlled chaos on remote

  • Published
  • By John Parker
  • 72nd Air Base Wing Public Affairs

When an Air Force plane suffers serious damage anywhere in the world, commanders have the option to deploy an elite asset for getting a wounded warbird back into battle or flying it back home for more intensive repairs: Aircraft Battle Damage Repair teams.

 

The 76th Aircraft Maintenance Group’s Expeditionary Depot Maintenance Flight at Tinker Air Force Base is one of only three such teams in the force. Its midsized, nondescript building on base is nothing out of the ordinary – except for the sun-weathered, dinged up hulks of a B-52G bomber and EC-135 parked in its “backyard.”

 

When called upon, about 12 times a year, depot field teams drawn from the roughly two dozen EDMX members fly off to war zones and crash scenes – anywhere an Air Force aircraft has been damaged beyond the knowledge and skills of the planes’ maintenance crews to get an otherwise flyable damaged aircraft back in the air.

 

“They don’t want to take a lot of time to patch up an aircraft and put it back in the fight so they can call on an aircraft battle damage repair team,” Senior Master Sgt. Thomas Opp Jr., EDMX superintendent, said. “We use technical orders that give us options for pretty quick fixes. Sometimes we don’t even have to completely fix something. Depending on where it is or what the critical component is, sometimes we can just make do to get it back in the fight and do what it’s got to do.”

 

EDMX specializes in repairing B-52 and B-1 bombers, all 135 aircraft models, such as the KC-135 aerial refueling tanker, and planes based on the Boeing 707 airframe. The other flights at Hill AFB, Utah, and Robins AFB, Ga., are trained to repair fighters, cargo planes and various other aircraft.

 

A memorable repair for Opp was when he worked on a damaged C-130 at an Army helicopter base in the Middle East. A mid-air collision with a smaller unmanned aerial vehicle took out an engine and metal shrapnel from the accident tore through the wing’s fuel cells. Engineers were needed to help figure out the fix, but the wing structure was still sound and the plane was flown stateside.

 

“We ended up having to kind of scrap the wing back together with just big thick pieces of metal, essentially,” he said.

 

Expeditionary aircraft repair is the flight’s priority, but the bulk of their job is working day-to-day with the hundreds of maintainers, engineers and technicians on base who maintain, repair and overhaul the EDMX’s specialty planes.

 

“The biggest part of our job here is working on the line with the civilians out here,” Opp said. “We gain a breadth of experience doing those jobs that we’ll never see in the field. Just the technical aspect of it is so far and above what the maintainers in the field are trained to do. I send guys to back the production lines, such as for B-1s and B-52s, so they can stay qualified on engine runs, electrical, and all the aspects to keep them honed on their field expertise.”

 

The EDMX headquarters is also the site for training current and new members, including through two exercises a year that test maintainers in lifelike scenarios. Instructors bash their backyard relics with fire axes and other tools to simulate real-world damage. In one scenario, the sound of explosions and small arms fire ricochets off the hulks as teams scramble to repair damage and defend themselves while under “attack.”

 

“It’s a rigorous process of what could happen,” Tech. Sgt. Kyle Schulz, an aircraft battle damage repair instructor said. “We throw everything in the book at them. We try to be methodical about the damage – not to give everybody just a simple repair. If something exploded in front of the wing it’s going to take out the wires and the tubing behind it, so they get some wiring repairs, they get some cable work, they get some tubing. They get a little bit of everything depending on where it is. It’s kind of controlled chaos.”