Boeing

Boeing has attained another "first" at the Guidance Repair Center by achieving Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) certification to repair the Carousel IV family of Inertial Navigation Systems (INS), currently used on many commercial aircraft.

Boeing became the first private contractor to privatize-in-place a military installation (then known as Newark Air Force Base) in 1996. The facility performs complete depot level repair of missile inertial guidance and aircraft navigation systems for the Department of Defense.

"This tremendous accomplishment is the result of a year-long team effort between Guidance Repair Center employees and the original equipment manufacturer, Litton Systems, Canada," said Center Director Dwayne Weir. "It was a significant Boeing effort," said Wayne Siarnicki, who is the Heath on-site manager for the Litton INS workload. "It's a win-win situation for all of us."

The INS provides worldwide navigation capability on a self-contained basis to airplanes. Each system contains control/display, navigation, mode selector and battery units. The system has the ability to sense and measure airplane acceleration, which then allows the self contained computer to utilize time dependent relationships to calculate and display track and ground speed and present position as latitude and longitude.

The Boeing facility currently repairs military versions of the INS used on such aircraft as the KC-135, C-141, C-5, C-9, and C-130. Building on this capability, the Guidance Repair Center successfully demonstrated to FAA officials its ability to repair the commercial version of the Carousel IV INS.

"This certification by the FAA opens the door to the consideration of other possible commercial airline repair business," Weir said, stressing that this newly opened avenue will make use of the same experienced workforce.

In addition to this significant achievement, the facility also was certified as compliant to ISO9001 within the past six months.