NAS Jacksonville Will Be Home To Repair Site For The New Aircraft

Fleet Readiness Center Southeast’s (FRCSE) avionics shop celebrated becoming the first U.S. Navy site to establish depot repair capability on a component of the P-8A “Poseidon” aircraft with a ribbon cutting July 12.

This new capability means that Naval Air Station Jacksonville’s (NAS Jax) P-8As will now have a quick, readily accessible repair site for its radars, right down the runway. The result will be faster turnaround time and reduced cost compared to sending the radars off to be repaired or modified.

“When I look at FRCSE doing this workload, especially because the P-8s are based here, I realize how we’re moving maintenance capability forward to the flight line – which is where we are here,” said FRCSE Commanding Officer Capt. Chuck Stuart.

However, Stuart told the artisans of another reason for the location of the workload.

“The reason we put this here in this building wasn’t simply because of the building or the capability,” he said. “It’s because of you and the expertise you have with radar systems. That’s why this work had to come here.”

The radar is crucial to the P-8’s patrol mission, and the AN/APY-10 provides the new planes with increased detection capabilities and range.

“The APY-10 works over water, on the littorals and over land with incredible high-resolution capabilities,” Stuart said. “It also has aircraft mission systems like weather avoidance. It does it all.”

The new Poseidons are quickly becoming a crucial tool for the U.S. Navy. The planes perform intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions in hot spots across the globe, in addition to anti-submarine patrols and other duties.

This fact is not lost on the men who keep the planes mission-ready.

“This mission is incredibly important to us,” said Adam Perry, supervisor of the FRCSE radar shop. “We’re proud that we are on that tip of the spear. We’re supporting the squadrons who are deploying to Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific.

“We’re supporting all of this right now. They’re flying these systems as we speak.”

The achievement at FRCSE was a result of three years of hard work between the depot, Naval Air Systems Command and Raytheon, the radar’s manufacturer.

“I remember walking in here to an empty room and just having a vision of what this would all eventually look like,” Raytheon’s depot program manager, Alex Sedillo, said as he looked around the room stacked with test equipment and diagnostic machines. “This will seriously cut the turnaround time for repairs and upgrades.

“Any repairs or upgrades that are required for the AN/APY-10 radar, they can bring them right off the flight line and they’ll get repaired right here.”

The new workspace was already paying off for the P-8 squadrons at NAS Jax before the ribbon was even cut.

“Just in the last couple of days we had a mission code update to the radars,” Sedillo said. “In the past, they had to go out to each of the aircraft, which is not the easiest thing to do – to upgrade the hardware.

“Yesterday, the Sailors were bringing the parts in and updating them and the job was done in about half the time.”

(Image provided with NAVAIR news release. Fleet Readiness Center Southeast Commanding Officer Capt. Chuck Stuart, center right, and Alex Sedillo, center left, Raytheon depot program manager, cut the ribbon celebrating the establishment of depot repair capability for the AN/APY-10 radar system used by the Navy's P-8A “Poseidon” patrol aircraft)

FMI: www.navair.navy.mil