Photo By Sgt. 1st Class John Carkeet IV | Army Sgt. 1st Class Shane Saylor, the maintenance noncommissioned officer in charge...... read more read more
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CAMP ARIFJAN, Kuwait – Imagine if you did not clean out your home for 12 years. Chances are that your 15 minutes of fame would come in the form of an appearance on The Learning Channel's “Hoarding: Buried Alive.” Now enlarge your home to the size of an aircraft hangar, multiply it by three and add a few acres of idle vehicles and full freight containers, and you may have a clearer picture of what awaited the soldiers from the 1107th Theater Aviation Sustainment Maintenance Group, 143d Sustainment Command (Expeditionary), 1st Theater Sustainment Command.
With fewer than 100 soldiers spread throughout Kuwait and Afghanistan, the 1107th TASMG, a National Guard unit headquartered in Springfield, Mo., currently manages an initially insurmountable task of sorting, tagging, testing and shipping thousands of pieces of parts, tools, equipment and machinery that had accumulated throughout the last decade.
“In the last 12 years that [the U.S. military] has been here, we've collected a lot of stuff,” said Lt. Col. Leif C.J. Thompson, the detachment commander for the 1107th TASMG element deployed to Camp Arifjan, Kuwait. “Units here needed specific equipment to conduct their missions. A lot of equipment came in, but as missions came to an end the redeploying units would leave it behind. Our job is to collect, tag and send that equipment to other locations where it can be put to good use.”
As the unit name suggests, the 1107th TASMG specializes in repair rather than retrograde. As one of only four units in the Army with the tools and expertise to perform major repairs on rotary wing aircraft, the 1107th's previous deployments differ greatly from its current mission.
“Until now, our primary mission has been depot level maintenance,” said Thompson, a native of Fair Grove, Mo. Back home [in Missouri] we cover a 14-state region in the Central United States. National Guard helicopters that required depot level maintenance are flown or trucked into us so we may repair and return them to their home state.”
“[Kuwait] use to be a big operation for TASGMs,” said Sgt. 1st Class Wesley B. Buehler, maintenance activity chief, 1107th TASGM. “At one point we had 250 people running 17 shops to include avionics, hydraulics, sheet metal and [rotor] blades. Now we have a few guys working in an engine shop, while the rest are tasked to the retrograde mission.”
Despite the severe shift in mission priorities, Thompson believes the 1107th TASMG has the right people for the job.
“Although our soldiers' [military occupation specialities] do not involve tagging items, boxing them and shipping them, they are still the subject matter experts because they can identify the items, compile them and send them back as serviceable sets,” said Thompson.
Their expertise has proved invaluable when sorting bench stock.
“Bench stock includes nuts, bolts and washers,” said Buehler as he picked up a handheld test set from a box filled with assorted parts and tools. “A component is made of bench stock. The screws, switches and batteries in this [test set] are considered bench stock.”
“It took five soldiers a week to count more than 73,000 items and sort them in 1,250 types,” said Thompson. “Most of this bench stock is used on aircraft, so our soldiers had little trouble accurately identifying and classifying it.”
In addition to bench stock, the 1107th has tagged, cleaned and shipped vehicles and machinery to units that urgently need them.
“Most of what we're sending is headed for AMCOM (U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Command) who has disposition on TPE (Theater Provided Equipment),” said Sgt. Patrick J. McDonald Jr., an 1107th TASMG avionics mechanic and project manager who hails from Camdenton, Mo. “We've also shipped seven containers with almost $2 million worth of bench stock to our troops in the Sinai [Peninsula] … They're even getting a tractor from us.”
While McDonald and a majority of the 1107th TASMG's Kuwait detachment tag, pack and ship literally tons of items, a small handful do what they do best: repairing helicopters.
“Most aviation units cannot do depot level work,” said Buehler, a native of Billings, Mo. “They either have to send parts to depots in the U.S. or have a tenant from the depot come to them. We have in theater the tools, people, knowledge and repair authority to do much of the work that the depots do.”
The 1107th TASGM boasts some of the Army's finest mechanics who can fix almost anything on an airframe. Many of these men keep helicopters airborne in Afghanistan, but a few in Kuwait have fine tuned their craft on engines.
“We're funded to repair up to 100 T700-GE-701D engines and 25 T55-GA-714 engines,” said Sgt. 1st Class Shane Saylor, the maintenance noncommissioned officer in charge for the 1107th TASMG's Kuwait detachment. The T700s power AH-64 Apache and UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, and two T55s are mounted on every CH-47 Chinook helicopter.”
“That's approximately $28 million worth of equipment,” added Buehler.
A native of Bolivar, Mo., Saylor explained the process of receiving, repairing and reshipping these complex power plants.
“The engines are turned into the supply system as unserviceable and are routed to us to see if they're repairable,” said Saylor. “On average we receive 12 engines per month and spend 54 hours man hours on each engine.”
“None of the 44 engines we've received so far were beyond our ability to fix,” said Buehler.
Buehler's bold statement is supported by the Flexible Engine Diagnostic System, more commonly known as “FEDS.”
“The FEDS monitors an engine's performance characteristics,” said Buehler. “We mount an engine on a test bed and run through a series of diagnostics from a control room. We spend approximately 90 minutes testing each [Apache and Black Hawk] engine.”
According to Buehler, a certified FEDS operator has at least 360 hours of formal training, many of which are dedicated to determining whether a failed test resulted from a defective engine or flawed FEDS.
“Anyone can monitor screens and push throttles [in the FEDS control room],” said Buehler. “A certified FEDS operator has the skills to open the control panel and find that one faulty wire in a sea of thousands.”
The thousands of hours the 1107th TASMG has spent repairing dozens of engines have reinforced the Army's resolve to remain good stewards of U.S. tax dollars.
“So far we've saved the government $27.7 million from buying new or serviceable engines,” said Buehler. A serviceable [Apache/Black Hawk] engine costs $700,000 each.”
In addition to impressing aviation units with its repair capabilities, Thompson is confident his successors will appreciate the 1107th TASMG's retrograde efforts.
“We're setting up our replacements for success by getting rid of the stuff they won't need. We want them to conduct their missions and man their shops without worrying about retrograde.”
As the 1107th TASMG disseminates its limited manpower and resources to complete diverse missions ranging from retrograde to repair, Thompson continually finds ways to enhance his detachment's greatest strength: flexibility.
“We are doing things that's new to all of us,” said Thompson. “The last couple of months have been a monumental task in cleaning up what has been gathered here in 2003. On top of that we're repairing engines and building a machine and sheet metal shop. None of this would have been possible without good people doing hard work to accomplish an almost insurmountable task. It's amazing to be part of it.”
| Date Taken: | 03.25.2014 |
| Date Posted: | 03.25.2014 14:28 |
| Story ID: | 122528 |
| Location: | CAMP ARIFJAN, KW |
| Web Views: | 611 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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