What I Do

[Jeff Higgins]

I usually cannot share photos or details of what I'm up to because a lot of it is considered "customer sensitive" information, but this time I can. As some of you may know, I work with an "AOG" - "Aircraft on Ground" team for a large manufacturer of commercial aircraft located in the Puget Sound area. We fly all over hell and gone working on our customers' aircraft; I am part of the team that designs all of the tools and equipment we use to do that.

So, here is kind of a fun one. NASA donated an old 747-100 to a museum. It's one of the airplanes that they used to ferry the Space Shuttle around. It's going to end up parked out front, on display with a shuttle mounted on top. Problem is, the 747 is at an airport, but the museum is not. So we have to drive it down the road to the museum... And, since it's really too big to do that, we have to take it apart first...

[URY914]

Cool. Can you tell where that is?

[Nickshu]

Cool pic!

[widebody911]

That's kinda cool!

[Evans, Marv]

So is the fuselage going to be totally or partially disassembled, or towed as is after the wings are off. Great job of organizing all the parts on the left & right sides of the pic.

[Jeff Higgins]

It's in Houston. Once the wings are off, we will tow the entire fuselage minus what we call the "48 section" (basically the section behind the aft pressure bulkhead, where the horizontal and vertical stabilizers mount) down the road as one piece on a rather large flatbed.

The "tools" my co-worker and I design that are visible in the photo are the large cradle replacing the nose gear, and the cradles under the wings. Other "tools" that will be used include a transportation cradle for the h-stab (which will be left in one piece), a similar cradle for the v-stab, a bunch of fixtures that hold and locate various power-feed drill setups for drilling out fasteners, locations for additional reinforcements, all of the tether fittings, and stuff like that.

[astrochex]

So its going to a museum in the Houston area?

[john70t]

That is a cool project.

Quick question: How are the tools you custom-design different from those already in use?
-Cost of sourcing OEM?
-Transport conditions?

[GH85Carrera]

I bet that cost more than a thousand dollars!

[onewhippedpuppy]

Very cool Jeff. Quite the setup you have there.

[LeeH]

Would be a cool time-lapse video.

[Jeff Higgins]

Originally Posted by john70t

That is a cool project.

Quick question: How are the tools you custom-design different from those already in use?
-Cost of sourcing OEM?
-Transport conditions?

We are the OEM...

"Tools" in the world of manufacturing large commercial aircraft can be anything from a screwdriver to a large, floor-mounted assembly jig in which a body section is put together, to as big as a wing for drilling skins, spars, etc. Many of our "tools" are bigger than your house. We delineate between purchased, off-the-shelf tools (screwdrivers, drill motors, etc.) and "special tools", designed specifically to perform a given operation during the manufacture of the aircraft.

In my little AOG world, we are not "manufacturing", and most tools used in manufacturing are too big to travel with. That, and we repair damage or incorporate changes on the aircraft. As a result, most of the tools used in manufacturing, even if we could bring them with us, are pretty useless for what we do. We use far more task-specific tools, designed for a specific repair or modification.

The cradle in the nose wheel well is a good example. We would never use anything like this in the factory. When we swap gear here, we jack the airplane on its primary jacking points. When we wheel them around, they are on their gear. In this case we had to remove the gear so it would go low enough on the trailer to get under powerlines and such. We also have to secure the fuselage to the trailer. So, this "special tool" not only has to support the fuselage vertically, it also has to accept acceleration and decelleration loads, as well as tipping loads. As such, it mounts to the gear mounts themselves. Normally if we cradle an airplane (as opposed to using the primary jacks, for whatever reason), we just rest it on a wooden buck since we are not moving it around.

The cradles under the wings (picking up engine strut mounting points) would never be used in the factory either. They are another job-specific tool that we will use here and likely discard when we are finished. They will be used to support the wings during removal and reinstallation, something we would not normally do. So, those are the kinds of "tools" I'm responsible for.

[island911]

Looks like fun!

[URY914]

Your tools are different than my tools....

[Jeff Higgins]

Here are a couple more photos. This is the RH wing, looking outboard. The "tool" that I'm responsible for in this particular case is the large beam mounted to the wing. It picks up the forward and aft engine strut mounts. The rest of the stuff, like the big yellow jacks, are all commercial items commonly used in our industry. The trailer underneath belongs to the shipping company we hire to drive it all down the road.

What was "fun" (at least for guys like me) was working with our wing structures guys to come up with a way to apply loads to those strut mounts that they were never designed to receive. No one ever envisioned using them to support the wing (we have dedicated jacking points for that, and we use cradles), much less any kind of side loads to "pull" the wing off the airplane. Fun stuff...





Oh, and here are the cradles, or wooden bucks we normally use to support things when we cannot use the primary jacks. We only use these when there are no for and aft, side, or other loads to consider:

[M.D. Holloway]

not seeing much duct tape so I'm not all that impressed!

[Scott Douglas]

How long is the 'trip' you're planning on it making?

[Shaun @ Tru6]

Very cool job!

[futuresoptions]

Cool Jeff!

[gordner]

Aircraft tear downs are a lot more fun and a lot easier when you don't need to reassemble it later...I have knocked a few on the head and it is nice to be able to just cut off the parts you don't need to get to the ones you want!