Fighting Fire with Neptune Maintenance

Neptune Aviation Services keeps an aging fleet of Lockheeds flying safely and reliably so they can fly another day in the endless fight against forest fires.

Over the years, aviation maintenance professionals certainly see change. For example, Juan Trippe, founder of Pan American Airlines, understood that rapid technological progress made early airliners quickly obsolete, so he used them up and replaced them with the freshest designs. He had no hangar queens. Now, in certain niches, the maintenance professional’s challenge is far different: how to adequately maintain airplanes that are a half-century old, as there are no cheap new-generation replacements.

Consider Neptune Aviation Services, whose specialty is providing aerial tankers to the government for fire-suppression activities. Once Black Hills Aviation, located in Alamagordo, New Mexico, Neptune was acquired by Mark Timmons in September 1993 and its headquarters was moved to Missoula, Montana about four years later, into a purpose-built hangar that can house two tankers. Timmons’s goal is to have the best company in the industry, an attitude that is reflected in the his approach to maintenance.

Neptune’s current tanker fleet is eight active demilitarized Lockheed P2V-5 and —7 Neptune tankers, with 11 additional airplanes awaiting reconfiguration or cannibalization. Currently, 28 A&P technicians (three are at the Alamagordo base) maintain the fleet and build up airplanes to add to the active fleet. Figure about 18 months to gut a "starter-kit," totally rewire it, build up a new instrument panel, replumb, repower, and repaint. A distinct advantage is that airframe times are low; fleet average is about 10,000 hours, and some airframes have as little as 2,500 hours total time. With virtually every component overhauled or replaced, the end products are effectively new airplanes, sure to win at Oshkosh if they ever give awards for best air tanker.

None of this comes easy. No matter how you cut it, much of what Neptune works with is obsolete. Even something as mundane as tires requires searching the world for a remaining set of molds and coercing manufacturers to run off a batch, please. On the other hand, a lot of surplus parts have been acquired over the years and stockpiled and inventoried. (Inventory control is state-of-the-art. Every item in the stock room is bar-coded and tracked by scanning both its bar-code and the assigned bar-code of each mechanic).

Bright and articulate, Greg Jones, Neptune’s director of maintenance, started in the late 1980s with Black Hills Aviation as a copilot/mechanic and has been DOM for about four years, replacing Mike Wornath. Soon after the company was acquired by Timmons, Jones and Wornath realized that there had to be a better way of maintaining large aircraft and they implemented a paradigm shift, recognizing the benefits of a comprehensive maintenance program.

In some ways, circumstances have driven implementation of progressive management techniques. For example, late-night phone calls about maintenance problems led Jones to realize that there were many old-wives’ tales about the airplanes and a lack of consistent knowledge. Recognizing the diverse range of experience levels of both pilots and technicians, he evolved a comprehensive and evolving maintenance-training program. The entire organization stands down for training one week annually. Additionally, each technician maintains a training record related to each component or maintenance task; each element requires formal training and hands-on experience before it may be signed-off in the training record. Leaving little to chance, the company sets up refresher lab classes in such things as fundamental as soldering or use of volt-ohm meters, knowing that any technician may be called upon to know their stuff somewhere in the country to keep an airplane flying.

Neptune believes that its employees are valuable assets and treats them accordingly. No autocratic managers need apply; Jones is adamant that this organization is a team, and that credit lies with the guys on the shop floor.

Besides the obvious financial commitment, a talented staff and comprehensive infrastructure are necessary. Neptune has dedicated avionics, engine, electrical, and accessory overhaul shops as well as a machine shop. A propeller shop is close to being on line, with the goal to have in-house capability to do anything required on the airplane, including manufacturing anything needed. The company is compellingly close to that objective.

Neptune holds a type certificate for the airplane, and possesses all the stress analysis and other engineering data, plus engineering and production drawings. No halfway measures here: all of this information has been transferred to CDROM and is readily available to every employee (each is issued a lap-top computer). Neptune also holds type certificates for the Westinghouse jet engines that power the airplane. Its repair station is authorized for accessory overhaul, airframe structural maintenance, and powerplant overhaul, with overhaul approval pending for the Neptune’s Hamilton-Standard propellers.

The Neptune is an interesting airplane. It has a gross weight of 80,000 pounds, a 2,700-gallon retardant tank (contract load, after industry-wide reductions adapted as an interim safety measure after last year’s loss of two tankers, is 2,080 gallons), two military Wright 3350 radial engines, and two Westinghouse J-34 turbojets (the two turbojets’ combined thrust is roughly equivalent to one of the piston engines). As 130/145 octane avgas is no longer available, the complex turbo-compound piston engines are limited to 51 inches manifold pressure dry. Neptune does not operate the Wrights wet and routinely makes the 1,600-hour TBO without pulling any cylinders, attributing this success to good flight-crew training and to Harry Anderson, the company’s in-house cylinder guru. Turbo-compound? Think back to A&P school and DC-7s and Lockheed Constellations. Three exhaust-driven turbines each pump up to 150 horsepower back into the engine through a complex planetary drive.

The airplanes are maintained under an approved airworthiness inspection program, with 100-hour "A" checks, and with B, C, and D checks done annually. Utilization is about 300 hours a year for each aircraft. Every maintenance activity is performed by a technician who signs off the job card, followed by inspection by his foreman, and a final check and sign-off by the supervisor. Except for not having some component hard-times, the maintenance program appears as methodical and stringent as FAR 121 maintenance standards.

During the fire season, an A&P is assigned to each airplane and follows it to its assigned base with either a van or a pickup and trailer loaded with tools and a comprehensive inventory. Neptune has found that modern technology is indispensable: With a computer-based maintenance library and a digital camera to send photos back home, the technicians are well supported. During the fire season each field tech lives with the airplane, doing preflight, postflight, and turn inspections and nonroutine maintenance. Road trips are common when airplanes are assigned to fires away from the main base. Typically, four A&Ps are "mailed" in for A-checks and engine swaps. Shifts run seven days a week in the fire season, with at least a day overlap, to limit possibilities of oversights.

Jones’s baseline is to anticipate, with extensive preventative maintenance, rather than be caught by surprises. He seems to have been ahead of the curve on structural issues related to air tankers and said that last season’s losses of two tankers (Hawkins & Powers’s PB4Y and C-130A) haven’t driven significant change in Neptune’s maintenance practices. For example, aggressive inspections undergone before last year’s tanker accidents, discovered cracks in 7075-T6 lower wing-skin doublers on the P2Vs. American Aerostructures designed replacement doublers that are fabricated in-house. R&R is about 1,700 man-hours per airplane. Neptune has X-rayed each airplane in the fleet to establish a baseline and will do annual X-rays. The mechanics will also install accelerometers and use other measures to attempt to understand the reasons for crack propagation.

Jones said that one of the attractions of the tanker business is that it is stable, without the peaks and dips of the airlines, although it has a downside in the short three-year contracts that make it hard to implement long-range planning. His staff has low turnover, likely due to supportive owners and his own enlightened and positive attitude. When he hires technicians, he has no hiring profile, instead finding that applicants’ attitude and aptitude is more valuable than experience with round engines or other facets of the industry.

Neptune is highly cognizant of last season’s loss of two tankers, after what appears to have been catastrophic wing failures. After those accidents, the government contracted with Sandia Labs to study the air tanker industry and to make recommendations for changes. It is no secret that maintenance standards within the air tanker industry are not uniformly high. One unfortunate aspect of the existing contractual agreements is that the low-bidder gets the contract, without any credit for those who establish uncompromising standards.

While operational issues were studied on tankers in the late 1970s, Jones suggests that drop techniques and other operational changes that have evolved in the industry since that study likely warrant a new analysis. For example, one hold-out technique from the TBM era of retardant drops was a "dive, drop, and pullout" that has now evolved into less aggressive maneuvering that is likely to reduce structural loads on the airplane.

Jones believes that the soul-searching after those accidents is driving change and maturation upon the industry and he believes that the changes are for the better. He feels that a better understanding of the operational environment and aggressive and methodical inspection and maintenance can keep the P2Vs flying into the future. After all, with low airframe times, the issues he confronts are less aging-fleet issues than finding support for old airplanes. Or–unlike Juan Trippe’s era of good fortune–finding a viable newer-generation replacement airplane.