Egress shop works to save lives

  • Published
  • By Staff Sgt. Olufemi A. Owolabi
  • 47th Flying Training Wing
LAUGHLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Texas --  Imagine, for an instance, that your life rests on the functionality and capability of the seat you are sitting in. This is the case for most pilots here at Laughlin.

The seat, however, is probably much fancier than the one you are sitting in.

The seat pilots rely on is the ejection seat.

Ejection seats could be the last chance for pilots to get out of a disabled aircraft in the event something goes wrong and the aircraft cannot be flown to safety.

Therefore, members of the 47th Maintenance Directorate's Egress shop, commonly known as aircraft explosive ordnance systems technicians, make safety and attention to detail their priorities when working on ejection seats.

"We are responsible for maintaining complete emergency escape systems used by flight personnel to escape disabled aircraft," said Rolland Mills, a technician at the egress shop here. "We remove and install ejection seats during inspections of the T-6s and T-38s."

In the shop, there is a lot of awareness because most of the things they work on are explosive in nature.

Everyday, members of the egress shop deal with explosive materials in ejection seats, which are designated to go off at a certain time and propel the seat and aircrew out of disabled aircraft.

They perform scheduled maintenance on ejection seats every 24 months. Part of what they do includes removal of the seat to facilitate other maintenance works and performing pull-checks on the handles to ensure normal functionality.

In the shop there is an array of equipment, such as pull gauges, motorized cranes, pneumatic test set, multi meters, centrifuge and aircraft canopy fixture, with which they disassemble and assemble parts in order to get the job done.

Eddie De La Paz, an egress technician who said he likes working on the T-6 ejection seats because of their sophisticated nature, described the job as critical to the Air Force mission as a result of the numerous lives their job can help save.

"Though it takes about four days to do the 24-month scheduled inspections on a seat, it is really worth it," De La Paz said. "The seat is a pilot's last resort in case of an accident."

Apart from locating and fixing problems on ejection seats, they also repair hatches and escape capsules, emergency oxygen systems, canopies, lap belts, and shoulder harnesses.

"The main purpose of our job is to get the aircrew member out of the aircraft should the need arise," he said.