JBER instrument flight control Airmen keep C-17 Globemaster IIIs in the sky

  • Published
  • By Airman 1st Class Kyle Johnson
  • JBER Public Affairs
JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska --  Aircraft have come a long way since the cotton and wood days of the Wright brothers. Their legacy of innovation has pushed flight to an entirely new level.

Now, a plane is much more than a brilliantly-designed piece of engineering; it's a living thing. They fly through the air for days, behemoths of modern engineering, and not so different from the creatures that designed them.

Dehydration is - generally speaking - a decreased amount of water in the blood volume. The body recognizes this and sends that information to the control center of the body - for humans, this is the brain. The hypothalamus then tells the pituitary gland to release antidiuretic hormones, which cause the kidneys to act as an 'effector,' returning more water to the blood, restoring balance to the system.

C-17 Globemaster IIIs have these parts too, and the Airmen who hold the responsibility of ensuring their successful operation - and the safety of the pilots counting on them - are known simply as avionics Airmen.

Avionics isn't a single career field; the complexities of an aircraft's anatomy is too vast for a single career field to specialize in. Instead, there are multiple career fields that fall under the umbrella of avionics, each with their own individual training.

"There was 'e-dub' which was electronic warfare; they worked with countermeasure systems, flares, things like that," said Air Force Staff Sgt. Adam Edmunds, an instrument flight control system journeyman assigned to the 517th Airlift Squadron. "There's also communication navigation, who work all the communications systems on the aircraft. The different radio frequencies and different callouts, weather radar systems, radar, altimeter [and so on]."

"Then there's instrumental flight control systems which is us. We work with, well, everything really," Edmunds said, who is currently serving as a flying crew chief.

The flight controls may be considered by the humans in the cockpit to be the control center of the plane, but the aircraft knows better; the control center is someplace much different, a central hub that processes information from the receptors and tells the effectors what needs to be done to change the situation. To the aircraft, this place is the mission computing system.

Working with and maintaining the mission computing system is a key part of an instrument flight control (IFCS) Airman's responsibilities.

"The mission computing system is basically the motherboard of the aircraft," Edmunds said. "Everything from transmitters in the engines to databases stored on the aircraft and flight control movements goes through these computers."

The mission computing system reads physical measurements from receptors like the pitot probe, converts it into electrical information, and then sends it off to the navigation system, said Master Sgt. Ben Haynes, specialist section chief for the 517th AMU and 703rd Aircraft Maintenance Squadron.

Then, the pilots - the effectors - take the information from the navigation system and initiate a change.

IFCS Airmen on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week in three swing shifts split amongst 12 people, Edmunds said.

The team's three noncommissioned officers are split between the three shifts; each shift must have an NCO for all the normal reasons, plus one - they are the only ones qualified to sign off on a Red X.

When a piece of an aircraft is determined essential for flight, but unable to perform its duties, it will be marked as such with a red X on the paperwork for that aircraft, Edmunds said.

As 7-level technicians, the noncommissioned officers are Red X-qualified. If there is a defect, or something is broken, a noncommissioned officer must verify the issue has been resolved and the aircraft is safe for flight, Edmunds said.

"After you receive your Xs, you are essentially qualified to say 'I am proficient in my job and I know this aircraft well enough that I can say this aircraft is safe for flight,'" Edmunds said.

"The jet is extremely efficient and our workload depends on the flying schedule," Edmunds said. "We'll have a couple slow weeks, and then there will be times where we work from the minute we walk in to the minute we leave, for three weeks straight."
Because manning is stretched as thin as possible while remaining mission-capable, when the waves hit, there's no calling for back up. They simply push through until it's done, Edmunds said.

Another key part of the IFCS Airmen's job is downloading information from what might be the most famous part of an airplane: the black box.

"The flight data recording system records absolutely every single parameter of the aircraft," Edmunds said. "If it hiccups, it will know, and it will be recorded. All that information is stored on the black box for 30 days and then we download that information and upload it to a contracted server."

The JBER IFCS Airmen are currently responsible for nine C-17s, of which each needs to have its black box uploaded every 30 days.

The data is exhaustive, covering everything down to the exact moment a particular flight surface was at a specific degree, Edmunds said.

All of these gizmos and gadgets are designed to work together, creating a seamless system; if something goes wrong with any part of the system, the results can be catastrophic.  As far as the C-17 is concerned, if items like the pitot tube are the receptors, the mission computing system is the control center and the pilot is the effector, then that makes Edmunds and his fellow Airmen the doctors.