Reward for a job well done

30 March 2010 By LAC Aaron Curran

Dedication to the job, ingenuity and inspiration are some of the words used to describe a member of HMAS Stuart’s Ships Flight.

LSATA Dylan Ewart lead by example when it came to the maintenance of the ‘Mongrel’ – the Seahawk helicopter deployed with the ship on its six month rotation in the MEAO.

For his efforts he received a Silver Commendation.

The crew racked up more than 400 hours flying time in theatre and up to 500 hours over the whole deployment. On top of that, the Mongrel was always ready to go should its services be needed by the ship.

It was LSATA Ewart and the maintainers aboard the Stuart that enabled such a milestone to be reached. This is how he and the other maintainers did it:

“Every 190 hours an aircraft has to go down for servicing,” LSATA Ewart said.

“We broke the 190 hours up into daily maintenance tasks, so we poured through the books to plan out our daily maintenance goals and organised a 24-hour work schedule broken into shifts.

“The problem was putting the aircraft down for six weeks to do a major service which was no good in theatre,” he said.

“We could go out on a whole patrol - 30 days - and not fly once. The Seahawk gave the ship a pretty important asset. The ship can’t see over the horizon without it, so by having it constantly available, we effectively extended the ship’s range each day.”

Last year they developed a program to do the maintenance in dribs and drabs.

The plan was to get a maintenance extension request and with this up their sleeve, they would get 60 more hours on top of the 190 allocated.

“There are certain things that you have to do to the aircraft – you just can’t miss them,” LSATA Ewart said.

“So we did the penalty maintenance and the avionics guys would use the extra 60 hours during the day to make sure the aircraft was flying. Then we would take the aircraft down during the night for maintenance, pull it apart, put it together and do a functional test so it can fly in the morning.”

They did that regime at sea. For the big items that required them to take the aircraft down for a few days, they would wait until they got to port.

“With the major maintenance done in port the aircraft would essentially never lose a days flying at sea,” he said.

“It was hard work but the end result was it was never off-line.”

On top of the maintenance plan put in place, he came up with novel ideas to fix problems that had arisen.

“We had a hinge that was broken and we didn’t have one on board so I manufactured a new one out of some spare aluminium we had,” he said.

“I also manufactured a new bracket and did it simply by copying by eyesight the ones we had. But getting the commendation was a bit of a shock.”

Flight Commander on HMAS Stuart, LCDR Mark Massie was impressed with LSATA Ewart’s work.

“He has been a linchpin of the flight for a long time,” LCDR Massie said.

“He has an incredible amount of professional pride, high skill levels and is an excellent mentor for his subordinates.”

He said one of the reasons he received the commendation was his technical knowledge in overcoming aircraft unserviceability by, on occasion, manufacturing components from basic raw materials.

“It was that plus many other reasons,” LCDR Massie said.

“It came down to his unwavering efforts to get the aircraft flying.”