Month: May 2022

Source: United States Navy

The award recognizes individuals for their innovative and noteworthy achievements in the modernization and/or advancement of information technology, positively impacting the Navy’s mission for years to come.

Plante received the award for her superior leadership and significant contributions to NAVWAR’s migration to a single Microsoft Office 365 (M365) collaboration and productivity environment known as Flank Speed that will improve security and, over time, deliver additional tools to support a more productive Navy workforce.

NAVWAR Executive Director John Pope commended Plante for her success. 

“Amanda fearlessly stepped up to the plate, leading the command in the transition to Flank Speed, providing increased data security in a new cloud environment, improving user experience, and providing modern collaboration capabilities to support the distributed workforce of One NAVWAR.”

Under Plante’s lead the team successfully migrated nearly 10 years of data off six collaboration tools by the end of fiscal year 2021. To ensure a seamless transition, Plante established FS migration training, facilitating training for over 3,600 employees across the command, reducing adoption resistance in the workforce.

“This award came as quite the surprise,” said Plante. “It is an honor to be recognized by AFCEA for all my efforts leading our command through a major technology transition.”

Plante continues to support the FS migration and adoption efforts, leading a M365 Power Automate and Power Applications community which furthers NAVWAR’s adoption of the M365 Power Platform by automating manual processes such as the purchase card process. With a robust and engaging education campaign, Plante overcomes user apprehension by clearly communicating benefits of M365, presenting solutions in practical terms that resonated with users. 

About AFCEA:

AFCEA is a professional association that connects people, ideas and solutions globally by developing networking and educational opportunities and providing them in an ethical forum, enabling military, government, industry and academia to align technology and strategy to meet the needs of those who serve.

About NAVWAR:

NAVWAR identifies, develops, delivers and sustains information warfighting capabilities and services that enable naval, joint, coalition and other national missions operating in warfighting domains from seabed to space and through cyberspace. NAVWAR consists of more than 11,000 civilian, active duty and reserve professionals located around the world.

Source: United States Navy

OSHA defines recordable injuries or illnesses as those that result in days away from work, restricted work or transfer to another job; medical treatment beyond first aid; or loss of consciousness. A case also meets the recording criteria if it involves a significant injury or illness diagnosed by a physician or other licensed health care professional.

In 2021, FRCE recorded 36 mishaps, a 27 percent reduction compared to the previous year and a more than 60 percent decrease compared to mishaps recorded in 2016.

“Throughout the years, the Safety and Occupational Health division at FRC East continued to educate employees, develop policies and procedures and implement them,” said Angelo Owens, the safety director at FRCE. “All of that, after a certain number of years, comes together to have positive effects. I believe that’s what we are experiencing here. Not only does the command support and promote certain policies and procedures in the way we perform work, we also have managers and supervisors who understand what their responsibilities are and employees who know what their responsibilities are.”

Owens and Brian Snow, the assistant safety director at FRCE, both cite participation in the OSHA Voluntary Protection Program (VPP) as an important catalyst in forming the safety culture that exists at the depot. VPP recognizes employers and workers in the private industry and federal agencies who have implemented effective safety and health management systems and maintain injury and illness rates below national Bureau of Labor Statistics averages for their respective industries. To participate, employers must submit an application to OSHA and undergo a rigorous onsite evaluation by a team of safety and health professionals.

“We started on this road in 2006 with our involvement in VPP,” Snow said. “Just getting the command into the mindset to do it actually got us on the right road to reducing injuries. The application process in itself is a huge undertaking. They came in to evaluate and we did it.”

In 2019, FRCE achieved the OSHA VPP Star Status in two of the depot’s application areas—smaller subsections of the expansive facility, each consisting of no more than 500 employees—becoming the first Naval Aviation command to reach that level.

“VPP Star is the highest recognition you can achieve with OSHA,” Owens said. “When you say you are a VPP Star site, it states that your safety and health programs exceed OSHA regulatory requirements in an exemplary manner. When you consider that there only 21 VPP Star recognized sites in the entire Department of the Navy, and that we are one of them, it’s pretty exceptional.”

According to Owens, collaboration and discussion play important roles in the VPP process.

“It’s an all-hands effort and that’s the way OSHA approaches it,” Owens said. “We all need to be involved in the process. Communication is very important because it allows employees, supervisors, managers and leadership to talk about the issues we come across and how we can minimize the operational risk that we have here.”

VPP participants are re-evaluated every three to five years to remain in the program.

“We’ll be reevaluated in January of 2023,” Owens said. “What that means is that representatives from OSHA out of Atlanta, Georgia, will come to our facility for a week. They’ll bring with them a team of people who will be walking around and asking to see our programs, see our documentation of trainings and conduct periodic inspections. They’ll be going out talking to our supervisors and employees to substantiate that what we are doing on paper is what we are actually doing within our facility.”

FRCE’s participation in VPP has not gone unnoticed. The Department of the Navy is now collaborating with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health on a study aimed at evaluating VPP’s effectiveness in reducing noncombat injuries. This study will evaluate five VPP establishments by comparing VPP units to non-VPP control units matched on size and function. The Navy chose FRCE as one of the five VPP participants to take part in the study.

The command was also recognized by the North Carolina Department of Labor for its efforts to keep the workforce safe by being presented two “Million Hour” awards and the depot’s fourth consecutive “Gold Award.”

To meet the Gold Award standard, an organization must have had no fatalities during the award year, and also post a days away, restricted or transferred rate at least 50 percent below the industry average. For FRCE, that means the aircraft maintenance industry. Million Hour safety awards are given to firms which accumulate 1 million employee hours with no injuries or illnesses involving days away from work. Subsequent awards are given for each additional 1 million employee hours with no injuries or illnesses.

FRCE also recently completed International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 45001 recertification. ISO 45001 is the world’s international standard for occupational health and safety, issued to protect employees and visitors from work-related accidents and diseases.

“You can never let up,” Snow said. “Often, you reach a goal and the tendency is to take your pack off, but we haven’t been doing that. We just continue to press forward. It’s a continuing effort.”

Owens agreed, adding that continuous effort is vital considering the scope of the depot’s safety program.

“We’ve had a good year, but that was last year,” Owens said. “We’re trying to press the gas harder because I believe when you are performing well you need to work even harder to maintain that level of performance. There are more than 53 safety and occupational health programs we oversee in various capacities, ranging from radiation safety to fall protection. We are doing a good job, but I believe we can always do better.”

While Owens and his team are proud of FRCE’s safety record and achievements, he says the main focus is on protecting the depot’s most important asset.

“As we continue to put aircraft out, we have to ensure we are doing it in a manner that protects our employees,” he said. “We genuinely care about the FRC East family and we want to ensure the people who come here to work have a safe and healthy environment to work in.”  

Source: United States Navy

The APU filter is a consumable item that is replaced after 1,120 flight hours; it is ordinarily used for one cycle and disposed of after removal. With 375 aircraft in the Marine Corps fleet, the filter is a commonly used item, with a replacement rate of about 100 a month. The quarter-sized metallic filter is available from only one source and, due to supply-chain issues, the supplier couldn’t keep up with demand. With no filters to be found in the supply system, APU engineering and logistics personnel had to come up with a creative solution to fill the needs of the V-22 aircraft and the APUs undergoing overhaul at FRCE.     

“We looked around for any retail or hidden assets that we might have stored away somewhere, but didn’t find anything,” said Joe Carson, V-22 Power and Propulsion logistics team lead at FRCE. “The filter was a consumable item, so typically the last option would be to ask engineering to reuse something that’s a disposable item—but in this case, that was the last solution we had.”

The filter is part of a critical oil line that helps engage the APU clutch to the mid-wing gearbox in order to start the V-22’s main engines. Fleet maintainers are instructed to replace the filters when they are found to be clogged during inspection, but the supplier was not expecting deliveries until March 2022. That meant that several aircraft would not fly until filters could be found.

“Most engineers don’t like reusing something that’s consumable, because it’s consumable for a reason,” said Rob Wansker, FRCE V-22 Power and Propulsion APU senior engineer. “So we consider, what’s the consequence of using this for a prolonged period of time? Can we push back the timeframe of replacement? We weighed our short- and long-term options, and we decided to see if we could clean and recertify the filters we had.”

Engineering consulted with the Materials Engineering lab at FRCE to determine the best way to clean the small mesh filter. After experimenting with a few scrap filters, FRCE chemist Megan Goold found a procedure that would allow the filters to be cleaned and reused if new filters were not available.

“I wanted to do the easiest cleaning possible, using materials the APU shop already had on hand that would be easily and readily available to the fleet as well,” Goold said. “The easiest thing would be hand cleaning, so we tried different things in the lab until we found something that worked.”

Isopropyl alcohol and a commonly used degreasing solvent did the trick, and engineering created a temporary instruction for depot and fleet maintainers to follow until the filters became more readily available through supply.

Another hurdle to solving this problem was that used filters were not readily available to clean. Disposable items like the filters are typically thrown away following maintenance procedures, which meant no stock of used filters existed. Wansker coordinated with depot and fleet mechanics working on V-22 APUs to encourage them to set aside the used filters in case they were needed for inspection and cleaning.

“We then took the filters that looked like good candidates, and cleaned and tested them according to the temporary procedure we had created,” Wansker said. “Once we were able to get a batch of clean filters that engineering had approved, we were able to send those directly to the squadrons in order for them to be installed on an APU.”

The engineering and logistics team had a temporary solution in place within a few weeks of identifying the supply problem. In that time, four aircraft had been grounded waiting for APU servo-valve filters, and the ability to clean and reissue the filters quickly returned those V-22 Ospreys
to duty.

V-22 team members say the incident reminds them that even projects that seem routine can have profound impacts on the warfighters they serve.

“The V-22 Osprey is a massive aircraft, and to think that our team’s assistance with this project was able to get these aircraft back in the air helps put the importance of what we do in perspective,” Wansker said.