Maintenance checks help ensure score stays "100 to 0 in our favor"

  • Published
  • By Capt. Aaron Milner
  • 52nd Aircraft Maintenance Squadron
SPANGDAHLEM AIR BASE, Germany (USAFENS) --  When I first heard the words “combat” and “flightline” together, I started to see images of jets on a tarmac; a scorching sun; 12-hour shifts with the cycle of work, sleep, work, sleep. I imagined not seeing my friends and family for months, just like being downrange.

Then the realization hit me -- I was wrong, yet right at the same time.

The U.S. Air Forces in Europe’s Web site states that the purpose of the Combat Flightline program is to enhance flying operations by ensuring the best personnel are in the right jobs, and resources are applied in the most efficient and effective way possible. This is done through monthly statistical analysis of critical metrics, aircraft appearance competitions and quarterly combat crew challenge competitions.

Combat Flightline is not necessarily a deployed location away from your loved ones and friends, but it’s really a way of seeing and predicting how well we accomplish our mission.

These statistics show us a “road map” of performance, pointing out the positive and negative trends so the appropriate level of supervision can tweak the process, ensuring that combat edge.

Monthly and quarterly competitions sharpen the edge as well. In the competitions, maintenance teams shine with pride, develop their skills, display their dedication and produce phenomenal looking jets for the U.S. Air Force.

Although the program is called Combat Flightline, maintainers from all over the Maintenance Group are represented in the metrics.

Maintainers must document every maintenance action. A majority of those maintenance actions are written in aircraft forms. Aircraft forms are logs of maintenance that either needs to be performed or has been performed.

These forms are scrutinized daily with a fine tooth comb by supervisors and maintenance quality assurance members, ensuring the aircraft documentation is as accurate as humanly possible. Poorly documented forms could equate to poorly maintained jets. Poorly maintained jets lead to no mission. No mission means we possess a very expensive static display aircraft.

I can equate this to a simple analogy.

If you were to take your vehicle in for a tune up but then when you picked it up you received no or poor documentation of the work performed, wouldn’t the doubt begin to creep into your mind at the slightest hint of a problem? Wouldn’t you wonder if the vehicle attendant really replaced the oil, oil filter and drain plug.

I certainly would never trust poor documentation practices for my personal vehicle and we should never accept poor documentation when a multi-million dollar aircraft and a pilot’s life are at stake.

Since the inception of Combat Flightline and the extra emphasis that has been placed on aircraft forms, the 52nd Maintenance Group has gone from an initial forms pass rate of 58 percent to 92 percent in just one year. This equates to one heck of a warm fuzzy to all maintainers and pilots.

The bottom line is Combat Flightline shows us where we have been and where we are headed and provides maintenance with the most accurate evaluation of our performance, ensuring we can fight in place as well as if we were downrange.

As General John P. Jumper said, “I want the score to be 100 to 0 in our favor.”

With Combat Flightline, we achieve this goal.