"We originally thought AMP would give pilots the same information they were used to seeing, but present it differently," says Lt. Col. Tim Hebel, the C-5 Avionics Modernization Program project officer at Dover AFB, Delaware. "We found that the upgrade gives them more tools in a new cockpit and this required a different flying technique and new regulations to use those tools. Pilots experience a learning curve, but once they learn AMP, they have a lot more capability. The difference between flying a C-5 AMP and a C-5 without AMP is like the difference between driving an old Beetle or driving a new Corvette."
The AMP modification (shown here) replaces the earlier analog avionics in the Galaxy with a commercially available digital suite along with an integrated architecture that allows for upgrades. It incorporates a digital, all-weather flight control system and autopilot, color liquid crystal flat panel displays, an advanced embedded global positioning/inertial navigation system, and a new communications suite that features satellite communications and a high-frequency datalink.
The entire system is designed to increase safety, ease crew workload, and enhance situational awareness, particularly in the coming global communications, navigation, surveillance/air traffic management, or GCNS/ATM controlled airspace. GCNS/ATM, formerly called Global Air Traffic Management, will essentially put eight aircraft in the space now filled by two aircraft of any type. Noncompliant aircraft will be forced to take longer routes over the ocean, which means a C-5 without AMP would be carrying more fuel and less cargo.
"Navigationally, the system allows us to do a lot more," says Capt. Doug Jackson, an AMP instructor pilot at Dover. "The technology in AMP allows us to meet the GATM standards. Now in the airspace, we have to report at a waypoint within plus or minus three minutes. Under the new rules, we will have to report within seconds. Many more aircraft will be in the same airspace, and we have to be where we are supposed to be. Those rules are down the road, but they are coming."
The flight line at Dover is nearly filled with Galaxys that have undergone the AMP upgrade. By the end of 2006, the last two of eighteen aircraft assigned to the active duty 436th Airlift Wing and the Air Force Reserve Associate unit, the 512th AW, will have been modified with the new cockpit avionics. The aircraft will join the other modified C-5s already in service at the base.
"There is a lot of capability in AMP," notes Hebel, who has fourteen years' experience in the C-5 cockpit and was instrumental in the beddown of the AMP aircraft at Dover. "I don't want to go back to the legacy cockpit. With AMP, I've got autothrottles; I've got a dedicated navigation display with a map of the world and information about every airport in it. I can also program my own custom navigational waypoints with special attributes to make particular tasks much easier to perform. We are flying C-5 AMP into Iraq today with no restrictions."
Sharing the nearly mile-long flight line at Dover is the AMP modification line, where two C-5s at a time, parked side by side, are going through the upgrade process. This scene is repeated at Travis AFB, California, where a second AMP modification line is up and running. Approximately one-third of the forty-nine C-5B fleet has now been modified. The first C-5C modification is nearing completion. The remaining C-5C and the sixty C-5As are scheduled to follow in turn.
When a C-5 comes in for modification, the aircraft is essentially gutted, at least electrically. "We remove 12,000 wires and put 9,000 wires back in," says Stephen Rall, the Lockheed Martin AMP manager at Dover. "We install wiring all the way up the tail."
The C-5's size actually works to the install team's advantage in one respect. They turn the aircraft to be modified into a workshop — desks, tool chests, and work stands are all set up in the cargo compartment — which keeps the technicians from having to go back and forth to the hangar for tools and parts. The team built several large, specialized platforms for access to particular areas of the aircraft, such as underneath the flight deck floor.
The technicians tend to stay in one area when they work, such as at the flight deck avionics rack. They get accustomed to the one area and can even remember where the individual wires are and where they go. "You can tell a tech who is overly particular about how his wiring looks — the physical appearance of the bundle, how neatly it is tied off, and where it is placed — is a good electrician," Rall observes.
Modifying a Galaxy is an all-day, five-day-a-week operation. "We hire mostly local technicians with previous Air Force experience," notes Rall. "Nearly all of them worked on C-5s in the military. We have a good system in place, and we have a familiarity with the aircraft."
The first aircraft through the modification line took 23,000 hours to complete. The span has been reduced by close to 10,000 hours and considerably fewer days. The reductions have come from experience and the way the work is sequenced.
The finished AMP cockpit has seven six-inch by eight-inch flat panel liquid crystal displays, with six for the pilot and co-pilot and one on the engineer's panel. These displays produce little heat, are fully readable in sunlight, and have proved reliable in years of use on commercial airliners.
Functional tests begin on the aircraft at about Day 65 of the mod process. Near the end, the Air Force starts its inspections. "It takes up to two weeks to go through all the checks and sign off on the aircraft," notes Hebel. At Dover, a modified aircraft is returned to the Air Force approximately 115 days after it was started on the modification line.
"The AMP hardware is very reliable," notes Rall. "Any future changes in these cockpits will be a sustainment software upgrade, not a hardware change. But anytime we make a major system change, it takes a lot of work."
Indeed, putting digital avionics on analog aircraft proved to be a challenge. "AMP development went from two planned software blocks to four," notes Blair Marks, the Lockheed Martin C-5 AMP program manager. The program moved rapidly and paused when some of the aircraft were needed for operational missions in the Middle East. This allowed more time for the fault isolation manuals for AMP to be refined. "The Air Force and contractor team have worked together to address every challenge along the way," Marks says.
"When we started, it was all on-the-job training," recalls TSgt. Michael Matthews, one of the Air Force maintenance supervisors at Dover. "Since OT&E, formal training has gotten a lot better. We still have a lot of on-aircraft work, but the support behind the work is better."
SSgt. Carlos Manriquez adds, "We now have better quality technical orders to work from. Early on, we kind of had the cart in front of the horse in some areas. The technical orders are getting better. We were using the preliminary tech order data, and now we are getting updated information."
OT&E was then restarted and completed in the summer of 2006. The test aircraft recorded an eighty-five percent sortie reliability rate during OT&E, and AMP systems performed very well during the 350 hours of testing. No sorties were lost due to AMP component issues. "The system still has some warts," Hebel notes. "Going through a learning curve is not always fun. But most of the issues are fixed now. Bottom line: we're getting the job done."
The transition to an all-AMP, active duty fleet is well under way. All AMP aircrew training is done at Dover. Instructor pilots from Travis are at Dover for initial cadre training. To assist in the transition, the legacy simulator at Dover has been replaced with an AMP simulator.
"Going to AMP from the legacy cockpit is a big transition," says Maj. Bob Shelton, a C-5 AMP aircraft commander at Dover. "It requires some intensive training. We still have the throttle and yoke, but pilots must remember that this is mostly a new aircraft and they have to fly it that way. We have to learn some new terminology and new visuals. We have to train our eyes to do a proper cross-check. Learning to fly this aircraft is like learning to drive a new car. We intuitively know the basics: turn the key, put it in gear, and put a foot on the gas to make it go. We still use the basic skills to fly a C-5. However, the C-5 AMP cockpit provides more information. Learning to use it all is more of a human factors' issue."
"Only a small number of people will fly both the AMP and legacy aircraft," Hebel adds. "AMP has enough differences that pilots have to focus their full attention on the new procedures and equipment. We tried to go both ways, but it essentially became 'once you go AMP, you stay AMP.' None of the new pilots coming to the Dover flight line will fly the legacy cockpit.
"We worked with Air Mobility Command Standardization/Evaluation and had lots of conference calls when we started," recalls Hebel. "We knew that nobody knew everything about AMP. We had a lot of work to do to reconcile our legacy C-5 procedures with the new AMP equipment. For example, when we needed to check our navigation equipment, an AMC procedure requires that we operate specific equipment. Since that equipment was removed and upgraded with AMP, we had to figure out how to per-form the old procedures with the new equipment. This involved a lot of rewriting of regulations. We have progressed far enough, though, that training issues are now handled in AMC training, and standardization/evaluation issues are being handled by AMC Stan/Eval. That's the way it should be."
Aircrews have accumulated more than 4,000 flight hours in the reconfigured Galaxys. "We get AMP and get it fully automated, and it is a thing of beauty," says Hebel. "We have better planning tools with this system. A good example is fuel planning. Before, we looked at the gauges to decide how much fuel we had. Then we had to calculate how much we needed to get where we wanted to go. Now, we press a single button, and it tells us when we will land with an accurate estimate of how much fuel will be left. Additionally, when we fly an oceanic crossing, we have a datalink with air traffic control. We check in with ATC and verify that the HF radio works. From that point, we don't need voice communication over a radio. Communication is all done via a datalink. To change air traffic control sectors, we only have to check in to make sure we can communicate in an emergency, but that's it. Overall, AMP works well."
Jeff Rhodes is the associate editor of Code One.
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