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Keeping old planes flying: Airmen fabricate parts from scratch

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Carolyn Viss
  • 379th Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs
SOUTHWEST ASIA --  Editor's note: this is the second of a three-part series on the fabrication flight. 

From troop movements and cargo drops to placing bombs on target, deployed aircraft can't always wait weeks or even days for parts to be ordered and shipped to the repair facilities in the desert, so one team of metals specialists puts their skills to work to make new parts here, turning out the pieces necessary for daily operations. 

Members of the 379th Expeditionary Maintenance Squadron sheet metal shop, part of the fabrication flight, work what some may call magic, taking aircraft parts that are sometimes unrecognizable and using their metal artistry skills to make new ones. 

"We have a two-sided job, sheet metal and corrosion control," said Master Sgt. Scott Ruiz, aircraft structural maintenance section chief from Tinker Air Force Base, Okla. "We're extremely busy doing about 300-330 flightline jobs every month. "We're one of the more vital links to keeping aircraft in the air." 

The "very well-equipped" shop has about a dozen different types of tooling and machinery, "all critical to what we do," said the senior master sergeant-select. "The [Airmen] here are very well-qualified, and we can work on any airframe." 

So qualified, he said, that in most cases they can look at a piece of metal and duplicate it, even if they don't have a blueprint. 

"All the Airmen here are motivated, good people," said Sergeant Ruiz, who has deployed a dozen times to the Middle East in his 21 years of service. "They're basically metal artists." 

"I picked this job because it sounded interesting and I like working with my hands," said 22-year-old Airman 1st Class Michael Rutherford, a Guardsman from Keesler Air Force Base, Miss. He does the same job full-time on base as a civilian, and said he plans to make the Air Force a career. "It's cool to be able to take a part, look at it, and then duplicate it from a bunch of plain old metal." 

The specialists here not only duplicate parts; they also refurbish salvageable parts of aircraft that need a little "TLC," which is where the corrosion section comes into play, Sergeant Ruiz said. 

"The hydraulics shop gets in and breaks it down," said Senior Airman Jeff Sorenson, a corrosion specialist. "We put [it] in the sandblaster to take off all the paint that is baked on or peeling off, use a solvent to clean it, give it a coat of primer, paint it white, and then send it back out to be rebuilt." 

The whole process takes 12 to 48 hours, and the sheet metal shop can refurbish and rebuild almost any part for aircraft in the U.S. Air Forces Central area of responsibility, Airman Sorenson said. 

"At home, we're doing full paints on active-duty jets, so everything we do is three- to four-week process, but here we're doing it for the whole AOR," said the Airman deployed from Hill Air Force Base, Utah. "A plane I work on today could be going to Afghanistan tomorrow." 

While the back shop can reach more than 130 degrees on a hot summer day, the fabricators here don't seem to mind. 

"Some days it's really, really hot," Airman Sorenson said. But the specialists don't seem to mind as long as they can watch the planes take off and know they had a major role in its ability to fly, fight and win.