Corrosion office helps prolong life of aircraft

Published Feb. 9, 2009
By Wayne Crenshaw
78th Air Base Wing Public Affairs

ROBINS AIR FORCE BASE, Ga. -- The Air Force Corrosion Prevention and Control Office at Robins employs only 17 people, but its small staff plays a big role in keeping aircraft and ground equipment operating throughout the Air Force.

The tenant office, which is a geographically separated unit of the Air Force Research Laboratory, serves as the corrosion control office for the entire Air Force. Its job is to find ways to keep planes and ground equipment in service longer by fending off rust and numerous other elements that can cause structures to corrode.

"The cost of corrosion is going up because the fleet is aging," said Carl Perazzola, the deputy director of the corrosion office. "There is tremendous advocacy out of the Pentagon to really start to increase our role in all of these areas."

The office, in its 40th year at Robins, includes five active duty military and 12 civilians. The group is made up both of engineers and field maintainers. The maintainers, Mr. Perazzola said, help ensure that any recommendations made by the office are practical to implement in the field.

The office has the authority to issue technical orders to maintainers throughout the Air Force for new procedures aimed at corrosion prevention.

Sometimes the recommendations are complex, such as new types of paint and methods of paint application, but often the recommendations are simple, such as more frequently washing down planes.

Chief Master Sgt. Ronald Allison, one of the active-duty personnel in the office, said that even a simple spray down of equipment with water can make a big difference in corrosion prevention. That's especially important, he said, for planes that have served in Iraq or other desert conditions where sand lodges in crevices.

Chief Allison said the unit's mission is not just targeted to older planes and equipment. The office is increasingly involved in the design and development of new assets, because the wrong combinations of metals and paints can lead to problems down the road.

"They want us to concentrate on the upfront part of the life cycle of a piece of equipment, mainly the acquisition phase, so that we can build in some robust corrosion prevention during manufacture and design, and we are not having to take two or three steps backward once a piece of equipment is five or six years old," Chief Allison said.

The office used to have a lab in its building at Robins, but now any lab work or experimenting it needs is turned over to either a private laboratory or the Coatings Technologies Integration Office at Wright-Patterson Air Base in Ohio.

Corrosion staff members regularly travel to locations around the globe to measure how corrosion occurs at varying environments, and help Air Force installations figure out how to cope.

In December, Chief Allison and Mr. Perazzola traveled to Germany, where they performed the first leg of a corrosion survey for U.S Air Forces Europe.

Iraq and Afghanistan aren't necessarily the worst corrosion environments, Chief Allison said. Although sand can harm structures, it's not as bad for causing corrosion as the high humidity and heat at McDeal Air Force Base in south Florida.

One of the worst places for corrosion is Kadena Air Base, Japan. The Air Force Special Operations Center recently asked the corrosion office to help with corrosion issues with the C-130, especially those at Kadena. They traveled there to help resolve the problem, which was causing significant downtime for the cargo aircraft.

"It's one of the severest locations for corrosion there is," Chief Allison said. "It's an island out in the middle of the ocean - wind, rain, typhoons. I was stationed there for four years, and it was not unusual to buy a new car and a year later you've got rust."

Colonel Dement said the Air Force spends $1.5 billion annually on corrosion-related maintenance.

"Given the increasing age of our aircraft, greater environmental restrictions on the materials we use and increasing legal scrutiny and requirements, how we approach corrosion for legacy systems and systems still on the drawing board is taking on greater and greater importance," he said.