Super Cobra IMC revisits old idea – $700k of prevention saves $1.4M of cure
By
John C. Milliman, PMA-276 Public Affairs

Like informed car owners, members of the H-1 Integrated Maintenance Concept team at Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, Okinawa, Japan, are proving that regular preventive maintenance now wards off expensive restoration later – and saving the Marine Corps more than $600,000 per aircraft in the process.
Team members recently turned back to the fleet the first AH-1W Super Cobra inducted for IMC maintenance in West Pac ahead of schedule and well below the cost of previous Standard Depot Level Maintenance.
Previously, West Pac Super Cobras needing depot-level maintenance had to be flown to the Naval Air Pacific Repair Activity in Atsugi, Japan.
The new ability to perform depot-level maintenance just down the flight line not only saves Marines here from long over-water flights to Atsugi for scheduled depot-level maintenance, but the cost-saving IMC also debuts a unique relationship between NAPRA artisans, Marine maintainers and civilian contractors from the Japan Aircraft Co. (Nippi). Most other depot efforts only involve government employees, servicemembers and contractors. The Okinawa IMC also adds a foreign national contractor firm to the team.
“The significance of standing up the IMC capability at Futenma is that we now have IMC in West Pac,” explained Lt. Col. Tim Junette, the PMA-276 assistant program manager for Logistics. “Our worldwide implementation of AH-1W IMC is complete.”
But whether in Japan or at Camp Pendleton in California, Corpus Christi Army Depot, Texas or the Naval Aviation Depot at MCAS Cherry Point, NC, the primary concern of the IMC is getting Super Cobra maintenance returned to preventive, rather than restorative efforts, according to H-1 IMC manager, Scott Nast. Nast was recently named the NAVAIR Civilian Logistician of the Year for 2001.
“Our aim is to get the right maintenance done at the right place and at the right time,” he explained.
Before going to the IMC, AH-1s were reworked, like most all other naval aircraft, using the Standard Depot Level Maintenance process. Under SDLM, the aircraft would be inducted every three years for complete disassembly and rebuild.
Depot artisans quickly found themselves doing more harm than good.
“We were finding that the aircraft weren’t all that bad,” explained Nast. “And because we were tearing apart aircraft that weren’t all that bad, we were incorporating lots of maintenance-induced failures.”
To mitigate needless aircraft rework, as each aircraft came up for SDLM, it was subjected to an Aircraft Service Period Adjustment inspection to document its material condition. If the ASPA inspection found the aircraft didn’t need rework it would send the aircraft back to the fleet for a year. And under pressure from operational tempos and funding constraints, ASPA extensions eventually increased the average interval between SDLM periods to a current average of eight years, according to Nast.
The pendulum then swung the other way, according to Nast, and the increased interval between SDLMs caused more maintenance-needing “gripes” to accumulate on the aircraft.
Currently, SDLM costs approximately $1.4 million per aircraft, according to Nast.
Much like the lack of regular preventive maintenance on a car eventually requires major mechanical repairs that could have been prevented or delayed by regular oil changes and minor repairs, deferring depot-level maintenance required the aircraft to undergo major restoration when they finally made it to the depot.
“The whole idea of delaying maintenance got us to the point of restorative maintenance,” said Nast. “And that’s expensive.”
To get back to preventive maintenance, Nast’s team inducts aircraft for maintenance at each of the four sites every 26 months with no ASPA-like extensions given.
And because the aircraft get the maintenance more often, and without an opportunity to defer it, the IMC team catches a lot of discrepancies before they require major rework.
“The number one failure we see in IMC is failed working fasteners,” he explained. “And if you get into the aircraft soon enough to catch broken fasteners, the opportunity for structural failure is tremendously reduced.”
So far, the results speak for themselves. In addition to being named the NAVAIR logistics team of the year for 2001, the team has more tangible results for the team’s Fleet Marine Force customers.
“I’ve asked them,” said PMA-276’s Junette. “And they’ve told me they’re very happy with the product they’re getting. And what they’re getting is better material condition and increased aircraft operational availability – all for a vastly reduced cost.”
“The team has reduced the time the aircraft are out of service from 38 weeks every eight years in the SDLM cycle to 12-16 weeks every eight years in IMC,” stated Nast. “And we’re cheaper, too. IMC cost is $714,000 every eight years with one baseline.”
An aircraft is “baselined” when it is completely disassembled and reworked, according to Nast.
What sets this IMC apart from those of other program is the approach, according to Junette, a career aviation supply officer and former Marine Aviation Logistics Squadron commanding officer.
“Each IMC is different,” he explained. “The specs, intervals and components they look at are different. Ours deals only with structural components.”
Other parts of the helicopter, like dynamic components, are taken care of at the squadron level.
“That’s just normal maintenance,” Junette said.
The key, according to Nast, is the team’s analytical approach.
“We track every single task in IMC,” Nast said. “From the discrepant part number, to the exact task number that found the discrepant part all the way down the line. That gives us a great deal of information allowing us to anticipate material condition and keep all our processes standardized.”
And keeping processes at four widely separated IMC sites fully occupies Nast and his four-man team of logistics management specialists Darryl Lowe, Ed Hill, Bob Evans and George Doxey who act as sole points of contact for the various sites to ensure all issues are addressed evenly. The five men are based at NADEP Cherry Point.
“They do a very good job as honest broker advocates for the sites they represent,” Nast explained with justifiable pride. “They keep issues on the burner until solutions are developed. The depots they deal with consider them tremendous assets.”
Additionally, the Team prides itself on a high level of communication and spirit of “friendly” competition” it exhibits.
“When an aircraft went into SDLM, it went into a black hole,” he explained. “The fleet wouldn’t hear a thing until it was told to come get it. In our IMC, we send out a SitSum every week. That kind of communication between the IMC site and the aircraft owner is a real benefit.”
Also helping is the interplay among the four supporting depots.
“Each depot has a unique talent it brings to the team,” Nast said. “Cherry Point has strong processes and organizational skills. They’re using the Theory of Constraints to exploit some cutting edge technology.
“The Corpus Christi Army Depot has the ability to rapidly manufacture just about anything we need on the aircraft,” he continued. “North Island, because of its close quarters, has really streamlined its process. And the NAPRA Det at MCAS Futenma has elevated its cooperation with the Marine Corps to an artistic level.”
This level of interplay and teamwork is critical to the team’s success, said Nast.
“For IMC to succeed, we needed to have standard processes and good intercommunication among the sites,” Nast explained. “There are two kinds of competition – evil competition and good competition. Evil competition means you have secrets. Good competition means no secrets and you share information. That’s what we’re about – Acting as one team by playing off each other’s strengths.”
And that teamwork has already paid off.
“We’re about 35 percent through the AH-1W fleet with IMC,” Nast stated. “We’ve got 195 aircraft in the fleet and 64 of them have already completed IMC. 17 are in work now.”
With AH-1W IMC fully implemented, Nast is turning his team’s attention to the UH-1N fleet.
“We’re ramping up the UH-1N IMC,” explained Nast. “We’re prototyping at Cherry Point and the other depots are raring to go.”
Far from threatening depots as they currently exist, Nast sees the IMC as a bright future for them.
“The future of ‘depotdom’ is interreliance and team work,” he said. “No more standalones.”

—USMC—

Cutlines
Imc2.jpg -- NADEP Cherry Point, N.C. air frame mechanics Dan Crutchfield, left and Aubry Cephas test hydraulics on an AH-1W Super Cobra participating in the Integrated Maintenance Concept, based at the depot. Newly constituted worldwide with the addition of the capability at MCAS Futenma, Okinawa, the IMC saves the Marine Corps approximately $700 Million per aircraft by performing preventive maintenance or a more regular basis than previously done in Standard Depot Level Maintenance. The AH-1W is the first Marine Corps platform to use the IMC. Photo by Larry E. Conley.

Imc3.jpg -- Naval Aviation Depot artisan Zeb Tripp examines an AH1W that’s part of the Integrated Maintenance Concept, based at the depot. Newly constituted worldwide with the addition of the capability at MCAS Futenma, Okinawa, the IMC saves the Marine Corps approximately $700 Million per aircraft by performing preventive maintenance or a more regular basis than previously done in Standard Depot Level Maintenance. The AH-1W is the first Marine Corps platform to use the IMC. Photo by Larry E. Conley.