AFIT alum Capt Patrick Grandsaert  (M.S. Engineering Management, 2015), wrote an article titled “Augmenting our Airmen” published in the Air Force Civil Engineer Magazine, Vol. 25 No. 3, Fall 2017.  The full article can be read on page 24 here.
 

By Capt Patrick Grandsaert
Air Force ROTC Det. 045

Whether in preventive maintenance, upgrade training or routine Prime Base Engineer Force, or Prime BEEF, training requirements, everyone needs to reference a manual from time to time. Long-time veterans may be able to service a deployed water purification unit or a generator without having to refresh themselves, but most people do not remember the steps required on something they trained on at Silver Flag three years ago. Current innovations may be able to mitigate that knowledge gap between training opportunities, as well as speed up training for new Airmen.

Many may recall how in 2013 a product called Google Glass promised a heads-up display, known as augmented reality, or AR, while you lived your life. While there was initial excitement, people wearing these glasses in public were widely ostracized as violating privacy and unspoken social norms. Bars and nightclubs, concerned about patrons being secretly recorded by these futuristic glasses, banned such devices on their premises. This led to the ending of the product line in 2015. However, many businesses saw great potential in offering hands free, step-by-step instruction by using these glasses. Corporations such as the Boeing Co. saw productivity increases as high as 25 percent in construction of wiring harnesses and General Electric saw task completion time reduced by 46 percent, according to a 2017 report. These are unheard of gains in processes where second or minute task reductions are considered breakthroughs. AR technology can be applied across many other domains for similar gains, including applying it to Air Force civil engineering.

How can we apply these types of gains to the Air Force? Perhaps we could use Silver flag as a test bed. Have one student maintain our deployed assets after classroom instruction, referencing the manual. Then, allow another student to maintain a unit armed only with AR glasses that provide access to step-by-step instruction and access to how-to videos. As long as a varied number of students with different experience levels take part, this could be a perfect experiment to show the capabilities of this new technology in our Air Force.

Though research has shown this will greatly improve task completion time, there are many other potential benefits Students are spending less time in the classroom and more time hands on, while reducing overall temporary duty lengths across the enterprise. If this technology were given to deployed units, downrange engineers could feed live video of what they have questions on to the Air Force Civil Engineer Center, rather than waiting to get back to the office to fill out an email or attempting to describe the issue over the phone.

In a wartime environment, giving a civil engineer or CE augmentee a pair of AR glasses with various resources at their command would greatly bridge the gap between the time they were trained, or mitigate a lack of training when extreme needs arise.

At Kunsan Air Base, South Korea, the readiness flight took two days every month to train new augmentees for CE operations due to a high turnover rate. AR glasses would mitigate much of those man hours for both CE and sister unit personnel. This is not even mentioning our asset management data gathering process or allowing immediate references to help determine the condition of our assets.
There is much potential in AR, and through new procurement methods, such as defense innovation unit experimental, there is a quick contracting process for developing and fielding them in as fast as six months. One of the endstate goals for CEs is to rapidly adapt in changing environments to maintain effective and efficient installation support operations by fiscal year 2020. AR today, to support our technicians and augmentees, is a step in the right direction.

Editor’s Note: Grandsaert is the commander of the operations flight at Air Force ROTC Det. 045 at San Jose State University, California.