Photo By Tech. Sgt. Zade Vadnais | A U.S. Air Force materiel management specialist assigned to the 356th Expeditionary...... read more read more
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Imagine; you’re an F-35A Lightning II fighter pilot operating the world’s premier fifth-generation fighter jet more than 3,000 miles from home when an aircraft part stops working properly.
In years past you would alert your home station and wait for a replacement part to be delivered, causing you to miss out on days worth of valuable agile combat employment training. Today, you would simply alert the on-site supply team and have them retrieve the part from their mobile warehouse so the aircraft maintenance team can begin replacing it immediately.
The 356th Expeditionary Fighter Squadron’s supply team packed up a mobile warehouse of spare F-35 parts and traveled to Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, Japan, to train on ACE tactics, techniques and procedures earlier this month.
“We are here to support the 356th EFS supply-wise, with the assets that they need,” said Tech. Sgt. Christine Broderick, 356th EFS noncommissioned officer in charge of Decentralized Maintenance Support. “The 356th EFS maintenance support team brings all the tools the aircraft maintainers need to do their jobs day to day, but we actually bring the parts the jet is composed of. If the jet flies and comes back with a broken part, we provide that item to the maintenance team to swap out.”
Broderick’s supply team is composed of three Airmen: herself and another DMS specialist who are embedded with the 356th EFS, and a materiel management specialist, or “warehouse” Airman. While both materiel management specialists and DMS specialists fall under the 354th Logistics Readiness Squadron administratively, the DMS specialists work directly with aircraft maintenance personnel and are permanently embedded with the 356th EFS.
“We’re kind of the bridge between maintenance and logistics,” explained Broderick.
The team brought four Pack-Up Kits, which are individual shipping units packed with items from the Eielson supply warehouse, to Iwakuni for the training event. Prior to any temporary duty assignment, deployment, or other mission that requires extended time away from home station, the 356th AMXS and 356th FS provide the 354th LRS supply team with a list of items and aircraft parts to be packed. The 354th LRS supply team determines how many PUKs they are able to bring and then gets to work fitting the requested parts into the allotted space. In this case, the team managed to fit over 9,000 pounds of equipment into four PUKs to create a mobile warehouse of spare aircraft parts.
“Even though this is just training, actually packing the PUKs and standing up the mobile warehouse on site helps us get ourselves ready for deployment scenarios and gives us that first-hand experience so that if we do go downrange or if something happens in the world, we’re going to be ready,” said Senior Airman Samuel Freeman, 356th EFS materiel management specialist.
While the hypothetical training aspect is valuable, the actual convenience of having spare parts on hand is invaluable to aircraft maintenance personnel. The ability of this and other ACE concepts to sustain operations through persistent logistics has already been validated through multiple exercises both across the Pacific and European theaters.
“Plus, it’s awesome,” said Broderick. “The experience of being able to just pack up and go. We also don’t typically see the flightline; we’re usually inside of a warehouse or hangar. But we’re co-located with the aircraft maintenance personnel here at Iwakuni, so I get to see the aircraft take off and land, I get to see the crew chiefs salute the pilots as they taxi off. We don’t get to see that on home station. It’s not just about the experience and the training, it’s a ‘re-blueing’ experience to be able to see how our work directly impacts the mission.”
| Date Taken: | 06.10.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 06.15.2022 00:48 |
| Story ID: | 422978 |
| Location: | MCAS IWAKUNI, YAMAGUCHI, JP |
| Web Views: | 202 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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