Innovative Testing Makes What’s Old New Again

Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) - Lakehurst

THE (AIRCRAFT) DOCTOR IS IN

DISCLAIMER This work was produced under the sponsorship of the Department of Defense. However, any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Defense.

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Being one of the world’s greatest militaries doesn’t stop with developing well-trained forces and outfitting them with the best vehicles and equipment. It also demands that fighting forces be ready for the call of duty whenever it comes. To help accomplish that mission, an Oxford-educated engineer and his team are developing advanced diagnostic tools in their New Jersey laboratory to keep sometimes decades-old Navy and Marine Corps aircraft flying night and day.

Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) - Lakehurst - Lakehurst, NJ Public Affairs Contact: Allison Barrow - allison.barrow@navy.mil NAWCAD Communications Lakehurst: (732) 323-2811

Prepared for BEST by THE CENTER FOR HOMELAND SECURITY AND RESILIENCE

Submission Date February 5, 2018

OVERVIEW

NAWCAD | 3DoD Lab Narrative | The (Aircraft) Doctor Is In

In the shadow of aviation infamy sits a squat and unre-markable structure, placed atop the sandy coastal plain of New Jersey’s Pinelands region. It’s one of many buildings, hangars and runways comprising Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, a sprawling 42,000-acre installation.

Just down the street, a massive, rusting structure known as Hangar No. 1 looms on the sparse landscape. More than 80 years ago, crewmen had prepared the hangar for the arrival of the German airship LZ 129, otherwise known as the Hindenburg. The dirigible would not settle into the building’s interior for maintenance and servicing as was scheduled after its transatlantic voyage. Instead, the ship caught fire in the field adjacent to the hangar while it was landing, killing 36 in the ensuing inferno and crash.

Today, one team at work inside the engineering com-plex toils to prevent big and small aircraft malfunctions, keeping the modern aircraft and support equipment oper-ated by the Navy and Marine Corps running in even the harshest environments. Their expertise isn’t in creating the next generation of military jets or helicopters. Instead, they work at the cutting edge of diagnostics, an underap-preciated engineering field that keeps aircraft flying and maintenance budgets from affecting operational readi-ness.

Those unfamiliar with the world and work of diagnostics outside of the standard “check engine” light are in good company. Even Dr. Russell Shannon, the head of the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) Lakehurst’s Integrated Diagnostics and Automated Test Systems (IDATS) lab housed in the engineering complex, wasn’t all that familiar with it when he was asked to help create the lab he leads.

“There’s really no direct line into the world of diagnostics engineering,” he says. “Very few people set out to work in this field, but you realize once you’re in it that it’s actually pretty fascinating. Then you get drawn in.”

Into an electromagnetic bubble

THE (AIRCRAFT) DOCTOR IS IN Innovative Testing Makes What’s Old New Again

Deep inside a building in the engineering complex, like a nesting doll within a cavernous environmental testing laboratory, sits another structure, a curious little building that houses IDATS. Its walls, ceiling and floor are impreg-nated with metal sheets, creating an enclosure called a Faraday cage. This unusual construction technique blocks outside electromagnetic radiation from interfering with delicate electronics within. This isolation is important for the delicate electronics and instruments the team is constantly working on.

Inside, the space is broken into three electronics labs. Teal overhead cabinets are mounted on walls that contain no shortage of electrical sockets, one of which has connec-tor slots unlike any that would be familiar to a civilian. It mimics the electrical power of typical aircraft—400 Hertz, three-phase, 115 volts.

The labs’ fire suppression system was designed to emit gas that extinguishes flames without dousing electronics in water. And the lights overhead are all LED—the typical fluorescent tubes emit electromagnetic frequencies that get picked up by laboratory instruments, such as multi-meters and oscilloscopes.

The indistinct noise of computer fans and blinking gizmos pervades the space.

The stakes are huge in the world of diagnostics, from the potential loss of life and expensive platforms, to failures of aircraft, ship and other electromechanical systems. Better diagnostics can diminish expensive false alarms that trigger unnecessary repair and downtime. That’s why computer and electrical engineers toil to uncover new ways to tell if systems are about to fail and, if they do, what’s responsible for it.

“We’ve got a lot of equipment out there—some of it very old,” says Shannon. “It all needs to be diagnosed; it all needs to be troubleshot. We’re making diagnostics to get broken equipment back into the fleet as quickly as possible.”

NAWCAD | 4DoD Lab Narrative | The (Aircraft) Doctor Is In

It’s a world that gives enterprising engineers the chance to solve complex problems affecting the real world. Half of the work the lab tackles comes from requests issued throughout the Navy and Marine Corps to improve effi-ciency in the maintenance pipeline.

Shannon was one of those engineers, who got bit by the diagnostics engineering bug. He aspired to become a computer engineer, earning undergraduate degree in that subject from the University of Hartford in Connecti-cut. While there, he became enamored with robotics, and he was given the chance to pursue his interest at the prestigious Oxford University. He earned a doctorate in acoustics in 2002 after spending four years as a member of Oxford’s Robotics Research Group.

He returned to a tough job market in the United States, and found a position teaching math at a local commu-nity college. He was on the lookout for something bigger, Shannon says. When someone at an engineering meeting asked if he’d ever thought of applying to NAWCAD, which

conducts research, development, acquisition, testing and evaluation of everything that the Navy and Marine Corps fly, he submitted his resume even though he did not know much about it. Six months later, he got a call with a tantalizing proposal—NAWCAD would soon establish an avionics diagnostics lab to overcome major problems that were severely affecting the Navy and Marine Corps.

Big faults in no fault

Shannon’s Navy career path opened in front of him because leaders had a problem they didn’t know how to solve, he says. The issue was something called a “no fault found” electronics problem, an insidious but silent issue that was costing the Navy and Marines millions of dollars annually.

Testing equipment built into a jet or helicopter—say, a device that monitors whether an aircraft’s radio is work-ing correctly—warns the pilot that the communications

Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Garrett Finona repairs a launcher mount on an AH-1Z Viper helicopter at Marine Corps Air Station Camp Pendleton, Calif., July 12, 2018. Finona is an aircraft ordnance technician assigned to Marine Light Attack Helicopter Training Squadron 303, Marine Aircraft Group 39, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Dylan Chagnon

NAWCAD | 5DoD Lab Narrative | The (Aircraft) Doctor Is In

equipment is malfunctioning. That warning represents the totality of information available to maintainers. The failure indication could represent a real problem with the radio equipment, or it could be an issue along the cables and connectors.

It’s the job of frontline maintenance crews to get aircraft up in the sky as quickly as possible, so they don’t trou-bleshoot the problem beyond the most rudimentary pass. Instead, they remove and replace individual pieces of avionics. Often, they then find out that there wasn’t actually anything wrong—“no fault found”—except in the onboard testing system. But they can’t just put the piece of avionics back into the aircraft from which it’s just been removed. It must then be sent back to a depot or the original manufacturer to get it tested and ready for redeployment.

Shannon says that each time a maintainer pulls a good piece of avionics it can cost the taxpayers several thou-sand dollars in unnecessary depot repair costs.

Built to last in a throwaway world

In the civilian world, it’s rare to find a furnace or auto-mobile from the 1970s that still operates every day. By necessity, though, the military holds onto things a bit longer. The B-52 Stratofortress, for instance, has been “the backbone of manned strategic bomber force in the United States” since it was introduced in 1955, according to the Air Force. The vaunted C-130 has been ferrying supplies, dropping bombs and providing support to forces around the world since it debuted around the same time.

Big aviation platforms that have been in the Department of Defense fleet for decades have gone through waves of hardware and software updates as new capabilities are deployed. The patchwork of technologies creates interesting problems for maintenance operations and the equipment they use. B-52s, for example, once operated using analog components with electromechanical com-ponents and switches. Later, when a digital replacement was perfected, those components were torn out and their successors were bolted on.

“These pieces of equipment can be from different eras, so it’s like digging into the earth—you can see different strata of design philosophies from the engineers who created

each piece,” says Assistant Program Manager for Systems Engineering Matt Morgan, who has worked at Lakehurst since being brought in as an intern into the IDATS Lab more than a decade ago. “Another way to think of it, in terms of figuring out diagnostics for these different sys-tems, is that it’s like being a doctor diagnosing a patient that speaks in English about every part of their body. Except at their legs, they start speaking Japanese.”

Sitting in the corner of the IDATS Lab’s middle room is an example of both the need for evolution, and part of the reason why these older aircraft platforms enjoy such lon-gevity. Electrical engineer Dan Collins flicks silver switches and turns grey knobs to get the machine working. Dating from around 1977, the office chair-sized device is used to test a critical cabin temperature controller in the storied H-60 family of helicopters, members of which are known as Black Hawks in the Army and Seahawks in the Navy.

“It’s one of those types of things that you have to turn on and wait for it to heat up,” Shannon says of the testing equipment. “It’s now being used every day by Navy tech-nicians who are half its age.”

Collins and the team are in the final stages of developing the clunky, complex testing machine’s successor. Whereas the cumbersome old device demanded the muscles of two sailors to carry it out to a waiting helicopter, the new one, about the size of a breadbox, can be easily carried under a person’s arm. Meanwhile, the 20 knobs and switches in the old instrument—half of which have become obsolete and aren’t used anymore—are being replaced by a single test-starting button. The gizmo’s guts are stuffed with microprocessors and integrated circuits that automate the test, eliminating considerable levels of human error and decreasing the time it takes to complete a test from 30 minutes to just five.

Collins spends a quarter of his time building the tempera-ture controller tester. Like Shannon, he says that a career in diagnostics fell into his lap.

“It seemed like a cool gig,” Collins says. “I get to work on a lot of cool stuff. You don’t realize how much there is to do—how many different testers there just to keep some-thing like the F/A-18 running.”

NAWCAD | 6DoD Lab Narrative | The (Aircraft) Doctor Is In

Without touching the delicate circuits within, they may be able to tell a small problem before it turns into a big one.

The device uses two transducers—one that fires 3-mega-Hertz sound waves at a microchip, and another that listens for the sound that gets reflected back. That signal gets fed into a neural network, a computing system built similar to how our brain’s neurons are interconnected. Patterns in the signal are then compared to what would be expected from a functional microchip.

While still just a proof of concept, the instrument has successfully identified good chips from bad with up to 80 percent accuracy for three different types of chips. If it develops as the lab hopes, it could mean a quicker, easier and cheaper way to reduce aircraft downtime by increas-ing the speed of circuit board repair.

Engineering with purpose

The sheer number of avenues for innovation in the diag-nostics space, like that being explored with the acoustic tester, imparts an excitement for the work echoed by every worker in the lab. Drawn to IDATS from nearby universities with strong engineering schools, they are computer and electrical engineers who weren’t interested in the rush to create the next big consumer product or app.

“I wasn’t interested in developing an iPhone or new Chromebook,” says Mark Weber, a support equipment engineer who works with Shannon on the lab’s leadership team. “I wanted to develop products to help our military. There’s nothing more fulfilling than hearing from some-one who used the product.”

Patrick Verbovsky is a young engineer hired into the IDATS lab right out of Stevens Institute of Technology, in Hobo-ken, New Jersey, a source of many of the base’s engineers. He’s a specialist in embedded systems—where software and hardware work together to accomplish things. He knows seven programming languages and likes to build electronics from scratch. He is typical of the high-quality talent that the lab, and NAVAIR generally, has been able to attract over the past decade, Shannon says.

Since opening for business in 2010, the lab has grown from a few members to 15. Collectively, they’ve published

John Coppinger, the branch manager of avionics support equipment systems engineering, says that the H-60 cabin temperature controller tester points right to another critical reason to update instruments and make them easier to use. He says the IDATS team’s goal isn’t just to create better ways of testing critical avionics components; it’s also to dramatically reduce the time and expertise it takes for maintenance crews to figure out what’s going on inside extremely complex machines.

The lab has a very specific reason for reducing the buttons a frontline technician needs to press, automat-ing analytics to decide if something is broken and other improvements meant to streamline the testing process—making life easier for those entrusted with very stressful maintenance jobs.

“We don’t realize a lot of these frontline maintainers are 18-21 years old,” Coppinger says. “They’re not necessarily experts in diagnostics. They just want to do their job and not get yelled at by their boss.”

Aviation’s future demands next-generation tools

Modern technologies are also pushing the team into new areas. While they can now use integrated circuits, micro-chips, sensors and the windfall that comes along with the computing revolution, they also must figure out new ways to test the exact same components inside military hard-ware. It’s pushing the IDATS team to think up innovative ways to test complex systems.

The better their diagnostics, the fewer mission-critical machines are taken out of service. That’s why they’ve just unveiled a possible new tool—a device that uses sound to probe deep inside microchips, which are at the center of properly functioning modern aircraft.

Currently, military maintainers have no way to diagnose when a microchip goes bad without removing the com-ponent from the aircraft and stripping away an outer protective epoxy coating. But researchers know that the chip gets a tiny bit less dense at the exact spot where an integrated circuit inside burns out. So Shannon used his Oxford acoustics training to figure out a way to measure it. The result is a non-contact acoustic testing system that finds those bad components.

NAWCAD | 7DoD Lab Narrative | The (Aircraft) Doctor Is In

20 papers on their work, earned two patents and have four patents pending. The lab has also won several Navy awards. As word has gotten out of their problem-solving capabilities, they’ve been asked to get involved in other realms critical to mission success.

One of those critical areas is cybersecurity, as the Naval Air Warfare Aircraft Division tries to head off another evolving issue with old technology. One concern is that standard avionics system communications protocols aren’t hardened as well as they should be against cyber-attack.

The cyberwarfare detachment at NAWCAD Lakehurst has asked the IDATS team to modify a diagnostic device they had previously created to make sure a data bus is produc-ing a good signal.

“There’s naturally a lot of overlap between what you need to diagnose machines and for cybersecurity,” Collins says. “It’s all computer and electrical engineering, and we

both want to understand how machines are supposed to behave and what happens when they don’t.”

The cigarette box-sized connector rests between two test machines on a lab benchtop. The cable running between the two good machines has been clipped in two and the infiltrator now taps the communications link. A message is sent regularly from the transmitting machine on the left and instantly it appears on the machine on the right. But then the tap is given a command to alter the data as it flows through it. Magically, the bad actor’s message appears on the machine on the right instead of the one that was originally sent by the machine on the left.

“We want to know what happens when a device is attacked, so we made something to let the cyber guys test if the tools they’re making can detect when someone is trying to penetrate a system,” says Collins.

Shannon and his team have their work cut out for them, considering the IDATS lab’s growth and the endless list

Air Force Staff Sgt. James Hess receives instructions while removing fan blades from KC-135R Stratotanker engine for inspection at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, N.J., July 14, 2018. Hess is an aerospace propulsion systems specialist assigned to the New Jersey Air National Guard’s108th Wing. New Jersey Air National Guard photo by Master Sgt. Matt Hecht

NAWCAD | 8DoD Lab Narrative | The (Aircraft) Doctor Is In

of improvements that can be made to Naval and Marine aviation diagnostics capabilities. After all, nobody wants a catastrophe on their watch, and the tools being devel-oped at the facility offer the first line of defense against a little issue turning into a major incident.

“In our line of business, we see a lot of equipment that’s very old,” says Morgan. “When we see that stuff, we know there’s a breakthrough just waiting that nobody has thought of yet. You can just see that there’s a better way.

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