- Greetings.
^I am Joe Motowski and I work in the headquarters
^air mobility command airfield suitability office
and our spark take initiative is
development of a graphic display
of airfield restrictions and limitations.
The AMC airfield suitability office
assesses airfields worldwide to determine
if they are suitable for math aircraft
and our product, the AMC giant report,
is used across the mobility air forces
to dissiminate vital information
regarding pavement strength, airfield obstacles,
and other applicable restrictions.
A graphic airfield suitability display
would greatly enhance operations at unfamiliar airports.
Math aircraft and cargo carrying aircraft
such as the C5, C130, and C17 and tanker aircraft
such as the KC10, KC135, and soon the KC46,
these aircraft are really national assets.
They are depended upon daily to execute DOD missions
and represent our country at locations across the globe.
They also cost hundreds of millions of dollars each
and their numbers are limited.
If one is seriously damaged, building a
replacement is really not possible.
Unfortunately, wing tip collusion incidents occur every year
and our initiative would offer potential savings
by reducing air crew workload and improving situational
awareness and enhancing operational efficiency
to help reduce such incidents.
Currently, math air crew review the AMC giant report
to obtain pertinent air field information.
Now the giant report is a textual product
that must be manually cross referenced to an
air field diagram to graphically interpret the information.
This is a tedious process with room for error.
This spark tank initiative calls for
color coding runways, taxi ways, and aprons overlayed
on an air field diagram to highlight problem areas.
Everyone who drives inherently understands
the benefit of color coding to convey meaning
because that is how a stop light works.
The proposed method would simply have air crew
select their aircraft from a drop down menu
and input their max gross weight.
Then, existing data from the giant report would be accessed
to guide the app in shading or color coding existing
national geospacial intelligence agency shape files
to indicate problem areas and other information.
The electronic flight bag currently in use,
a mobile tablet, would be the hardware system while the
software would be a modification to the NGA arrow app.
While math aircrew would be the initial users,
requirements from other commands and services
could easily be added to ultimately benefit the entire DOD.
Again, this spark take initiative offers the potential
to reduce aircrew workload, improve situational awareness,
and enhance operational efficiency for the math,
but eventually for the entire DOD aviation community.
Thank you for your consideration.