E-tools help Air Force toss book out the window - Air Force News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Air Force Times

E-tools help Air Force toss book out the window

The Air Force plans to purchase up to 40,000 laptops and convert 65,000 of its technical orders into digital format by fiscal 2012 to make maintenance and operations more efficient.

Ruggedized laptops called e-tools eventually will do away with more than 13 million pages of technical orders. Now, maintainers sometimes lug four or five heavy books of TOs into a C-17 only to discover the pages they need are in the library.

About 30,000 to 40,000 laptops — at a cost of $3,000 to $4,000 each — will be fielded as part of the program, which also includes hiring one computer-support technician for every 100 to 150 laptops. About 28,000 technical orders have been converted to digital format so far, said Paul Lyons, a logistics systems planner at Air Force Materiel Command.

So far, the feedback from maintainers has been positive.

“They like the ability to place a rack of e-tools on an aircraft and deploy instead of loading a rack of library books,” Lyons said in a telephone interview from command headquarters at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

Ease of use on the flight line isn’t the only reason the Air Force wants to digitize its TOs: With e-tools, updates can be applied within a day instead of the weeks required for paper orders. When an update is released, a computer hooked up to the Air Force network replaces the outdated material. Each e-tool is connected to the master computer each night to recharge and receive its updates, meaning a tweak to a technical order released at 2 a.m. will be in place by the start of the day shift.

“It’s a lot quicker finding all of your information instead of going through pages and pages of a TO,” said Dewey Teal, a C-17 mechanic at Robins Air Force Base, Ga.

Maintainers can view most digitized technical orders in either plain text or PDF. Some also are being converted to HTML format with links to cross-reference information between orders.

Officials at Robins are coordinating feedback about e-tools from depot mechanics across the service, considering additional requirements and compiling a report on potential future needs. They will be analyzing the reports through Jan. 31 and then will brief the brass at Air Force headquarters, said Gregg Kelley, the e-tools program manager at Robins. The base introduced e-tools in August 2009 and now fields more than 300, covering technical orders for the C-17, F-15, C-130 and C-5.

“We’re still doing a lot of testing,” Kelley said. “We’re prototyping cabinets and e-tools. Why we’re doing that is to see what mechanics really want. Do they want a bigger screen? Weight is an issue, too.

“A regular e-tool might work for a mechanic, but someone doing engine testing might not want a laptop on them all day.”