corby78

Got a mini tour of the C-5 Depot at robbins AFB. Very impressive facility. and a very large ramp. They also have the c-130 and f-15 depot there as well.

Yukon 880

I will be very sad when we hear the sound of two pairs of TF-39's no more.

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gospodin

Are those C-5's being parted out? And are they getting a new style camo scheme, if they're just undergoing refit?

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Steve







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Prestwick Pioneer

I think (and hope) they are undergoing Depot level maintenance, and are stripped prior to repainting, as all the ones getting scrapped at AMARC seem to be painted up. I am in full agreement with Don, there is nothing in the High-Bypass turbofan world that can sound like a quartet of these going by.

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The Prestwick Pioneer

corby78

They were striped for depot maintenance, There was one not pictured with the tail removed, I would have loved to see them do that.

D-AIHC

Is depot maintenance the military equivalent of D-check for commercial airliners? If not, do the military aircraft have similar maintenance structure?

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corby78

I'm not an expert on depot stuff, but what I do know (mostly from talking to maintainers) is that the jets go through a lengthy checkout. The moving parts are taken off, sanded, inspected/x-rayd, and repainted. They do the same for the fuselage. For the heavys I know it takes a couple months. I heard a crazy story once that they found a folding chair in one of the fuel tanks once from the last time it was in depot. wooops

Justino

Looks like they're re-skinning them..is that normally part of depot work?

BTW, I just heard those TF-39s all last week when I was in Dover. Music to my ears!! The AMC Museum also has a TF-39 on display that they salvaged from the C-5 wreck up there.

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Justin

corby78

Defense News has an article about every 2-3 weeks on whether or not they are going to re-outfit the C-5 with the new engines. Not sure why but they had like doubled the cost to do the job.

Rex

^^Well when will they pull themselves together. I thought it was already set to be re-outfitted with those GE CF6-80C2's !!

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Rex

The rollout ceremony was held May 17, 2006.

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Justino

I think there are 2-3 C-5Ms now and theyre all out at Edwards doing testing. But in the meantime the budget for these things is skyrocketing and Congress and the Air Force aren't thrilled about that.

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Justin

Rex

You guys can always send a C-5 to China, and see what the chinese aviation companies can come up with. With chinese technology and sensational new invented engines, it won't get any cheaper than that !

Buy the clones from them for 1m USD.



The designation would be something like this 吉诶艾勒诶艾克斯吾艾-5

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Justino

Haha well they do have a "Crj-717" and their own 787 coming so you might as well throw in a C-5! Maybe they can bump that reliability rate up to something more acceptable lol

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TexAV8R

Came across these photos (scroll down the webpage) - its an old crash and its a miracle no one was killed. I would love to have that cockpit section!

2006 Nightmare_-C5-B Happy Landing

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corby78

very interesting pics of the cleanup.....I always wonder how they manage to clean some of these accidents up.

champpitbull2

Not hard to believe. During an acceptance inspection on a KC-135 I was inspecting an engine strut. After depaneling the entire strut, I found a whole set of the panels that I just removed from the outside of the strut, inside the strut. The guy must have forgot where he had put the panels and just went and grabbed some more. Planes come back from depot with all sorts of crazy stuff wrong with them. Your description of depot is pretty accurate except that planes are usually there for around 6 months. They do so much stuff there and are so pressed for time it's no wonder things aren't quite right when we get them back.

champpitbull2

New skin is applied only if they find corrosion or if an area was damaged.

corby78

thanks for the info bull. although I don't know if I want to hear all the crazy depot stories....lol....I cant imagine how pressed they are, time is money, and the big boss man doesn't want to hear he has to dump more of it into a jet because somebody found something with a magnifying glass.

champpitbull2

They are trying very hard to clean up their act though. They have been instituting a new program where just before a plane is paneled back up and sent back to its home base, mechanics from its home base get about a week to inspect the plane and to follow up on what depot did to the plane at depot. If the program is run the way it's suppose to, it works and many discrepencies are corrected before the plane comes home. However, it costs a unit quite a bit of cash to send a group of 8 guys tdy for a week. So the amount of time gets cut and it's not possible to send a specialist for every system which means sometimes things are missed. Since this program started I have seen planes come home with problems, but none of the horror stories of tools and such left in the plane. I would say they are getting better for the KC-135 at least.

Phantom

Tools left in planes shouldn't be possible at all as all tools are registered and get counted and checked as soon as a plane is about to leave the hangar. I'm sure that's also the way you guys deal with it. One tool missing means NO flying for the plane.
Of course there's an idiot every day, I remember a story of a guy who brought in an unregistered tool from his home as he had lost his original. The missing reg.number apparently wasn't dicovered during routine checks - the reg.ed tool was found some hundred flyinghours later by the depot crew IIRC.
Things like these should be indeed VERY rare. Hopefully...

corby78

Yah, the AMX guys are pretty good up here, although once we had a guy work on a jet while the crew was waiting to go. when he was done he was "missing" a tool. So the had to do a fod check and couldn't find it. The crew finaly stepped to the spair, and after the guy found the tool in the bottom of his tool box. But all in all its better then loosing it in the jet.

D-AIHC

According to the article below, there are 3 C-5Ms so far with 47 to be converted from C-5Bs and 2 from C-5Cs. The other 62 C-5As will no longer be modernised:

http://www.flightglobal.com/articles...-lockheed.html

"Cancelling work on the older C-5s will cut the estimated cost of the RERP from $17.5 billion to $7.7 billion, saving $9.8 billion. The projected cost when the 115-aircraft programme started in November 2001 was $11.1 billion."

The question is, why and how did the projected cost of the RERP ballooned more than 57% from $11.1B to $17.5B?

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corby78

So will those 62 C-5A stay in service as is, or will they go away?

D-AIHC

"The US Air Force has been lobbying Congress to permit it to retire the C-5As, which is prohibited by legislation..."

I guess they will stay in service but for how long, I don't know!

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corby78

The hang up is the number of large cargo aircraft available. If you get rid of 60 some odd C-5A's then you need to buy more C-17's which the AF doesn't want to do either.

D-AIHC

Found another piece of article which might be of interest, this time a budget contraint that may affect future procurement:

Aging Air Force wants big bucks fix - Yahoo! News

"Each F-22 Raptor costs about $160 million. The Air Force says it needs 381 of the radar-evading planes and is fighting to keep the production line from being shut down too soon."

"The price for a single F-35 Lightning is $77 million, and the Air Force wants close to 1,800 of these fighters."

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champpitbull2

The F-22 is $160mil with the current numbers but it drops to $130mil if 381 are built. Either way it is expensive.

champpitbull2

The idiots in Congress will make them keep them just like they did with the 100 some odd KC-135E's that they are now finally allowing to be retired. This is despite the fact that for the last few years many of them weren't even allowed to fly because of cracks in their wings. The Air Force has a way of screwing itself but Congress isn't helping either.

corby78

Sad but true statement. I really believe if the military wasn't tied so much to the political garbage that goes on they could probably straighten out alot of problems.