Air Force uses robotics to create part for damaged C-17

When Boeing couldn’t provide a replacement part for a storm-damaged C-17 Globemaster III, the Air Force turned to its own robots to make a new one.

“This is a tremendous win for our maintenance group,” Col. Karen Gharst, commander of the 445th Maintenance Group at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, said in a statement Thursday.

The C-17 from the 445th Airlift Wing at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio, was on the tarmac of an airport in Fort Worth, Texas, when a thunderstorm caused two civilian business jets to be pushed into the side of the military airlifter.

When the mess was untangled, the collision left the C-17 with damage to its fuselage, left door and nose. Repair crews patched the plane together well enough that it could fly back to Wright-Patterson, albeit with its landing gear down.

Air Force repair crews were able to fix the fuselage and door but needed a new part for the nose. Boeing, the manufacturer, said it had no way to get a vendor to make such a specific replacement part. Boeing delivered the last of 223 C-17s to the Air Force in 2013 and shut down the production line at its factory in Long Beach, Calif., in 2015.

The Air Force projected the plane would be out of service for a year until proper repairs could be made.

The wing sought help from the Air Force Rapid Sustainment Office at Wright-Patterson, which works on ways to fabricate parts that the normal contractor supply chain can’t handle.

Using Incremental Sheet Forming (ISF), a robotic press “deforms” sheet metal into shapes according to a digital blueprint. No mold is required. It was able to make the nose component, which was then tested and approved by both the Air Force and Boeing.

“Using the ISF technology to rapidly produce an otherwise unobtainable part allowed us to avoid a prolonged work stoppage,” Gharst said.

The panel is “the first part produced via ISF to be flown on an Air Force platform, but it won’t be the last,” the Air Force said. The service plans to make parts for other aircraft that are no longer manufactured, such as the KC-135 Stratotanker.