Omaha World-Herald
October 22, 2015
The 55th Wing’s gray-and-white Rivet Joint aircraft are a familiar sight in Omaha’s skies, yet only a few people know what goes on inside them.
On Wednesday, though, local news media got a short peek behind the Rivet Joint curtain. They toured a Rivet Joint RC-135V aircraft on the tarmac at Offutt Air Force Base, spoke with crew and maintainers, and tried flying one in a $12 million cockpit simulator.
“We’ve been here for the last 50 years,” said Col. Marty Reynolds, the 55th Wing commander. “We’re a part of the Omaha-Bellevue area. We want the people to know what we’re doing.”
But there are limits. Crew members couldn’t give their last names, and public affairs minders ensured that they didn’t reveal classified information. Photographs of the aircraft interior were forbidden.
A 55th Wing fact sheet describes Rivet Joint’s job as providing “near real time on-scene intelligence collection, analysis and dissemination capabilities.”
What that means is that the aircraft, packed with high-tech surveillance gear, listens in on the electronic signals of U.S. adversaries, interprets them in real time and passes them on to military commanders — immediately, if necessary.
55th Wing Rivet Joint aircraft have participated in every conflict since the Vietnam War and have been deployed continuously in the Middle East since the beginning of Operation Desert Shield in August 1990.
“We could get a tasking at a moment’s notice,” Reynolds said. “They could find themselves in other parts of the world in two days.”
Thirteen Rivet Joint aircraft operate out of Offutt, but others are assigned in England, Greece and Japan. The 55th Wing operates other surveillance missions, too, including Cobra Ball and Open Skies, but Rivet Joint is the largest — with 1,500 of the 55th Wing’s 4,200 sorties in 2014 and half of its 26,000 flight hours.
Todd Clark, a retired Rivet Joint pilot, runs the two RC-135 cockpit simulators, which are about 10 years old and in use up to 12 hours a day by pilots-in-training, he said. It costs $250 an hour to operate, he said, much cheaper — and safer — than flying in a real plane.
RC-135 trainees already are licensed pilots, but Clark said they take an academic course followed by 20 sessions of simulator training over 3½ weeks. Then they must complete six rides in a real aircraft, capped with a check flight.
The training cockpit is mounted on retractable arms that move up and down to simulate aircraft movement. Inside, the aircraft controls look, feel and react like the real thing, said an instructor pilot named Kelly, a captain in the Nebraska Air National Guard.
“It’s kind of like a video game,” she said.
Clark can program the terrain and scenery for almost any airport in the world, and can simulate high winds, snow or any other kind of weather condition. He rates realism as 9-plus on a scale of 10.
“We make it as close to the real thing as we can,” he said.
A typical Rivet Joint flight crew includes three pilots and two navigators, with about 25 airmen in the rear to monitor the “battle space” and maintain the electronic gear.
Most of them sit at electronic consoles with headphones. The work is so specialized that crew members can easily spend an entire career working the mission.
“Most all of us do specialize,” said an airborne mission supervisor named Tim, a veteran Rivet Joint master sergeant whose job is to assemble pieces of electronic intelligence into a coherent whole.
The work schedule is unpredictable and frequently involves overseas deployments. Tim said he typically flies six to eight missions a month, and lately has spent about two months deployed for every six months at home.
“It entirely depends on the world situation,” Tim said.
The crews most commonly work as a team in the confined quarters of a cramped aircraft. They become tightly knit.
“It’s a family with us. We look out for each other,” said an airborne systems engineer named Brody, who is an airman 1st class.
The Rivet Joint aircraft — similar to the Boeing 707, the first U.S.-built commercial jet — are more than 50 years old and are subject to the heavy maintenance needs of aging airframes.
Reynolds said major overhauls, called block upgrades, have improved the airframe over the years.
Still, he acknowledged, “there are challenges.”
The point was driven home April 30, when a fire broke out in the galley of a Rivet Joint RC-135V while it was on its takeoff roll at Offutt.
The pilot aborted the takeoff, and all 27 crew members evacuated safely. But there was an estimated $62 million in damage.
Investigators blamed the fire on depot maintenance workers from L-3 Communications in Greenville, Texas — where the RC-135s are overhauled — for failing to properly secure oxygen lines, which caused a leak that fed the blaze.
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