Who Makes the Wheels Turn? Local man!

  • Published
  • By Marie Johnson
  • 97th Maintenance Directorate
ALTUS AIR FORCE BASE --  The Local Manufacture Element, or “local man” as it is more commonly known, is an essential part of maintenance support.

Local man supports maintenance by researching technical order end-item parts and facilitating the organic manufacture of parts needed by maintainers to keep aircraft flying.

The 97th MX local man shop is a two-person office operated by Doug Thomas and Stephanie Tolliver-Clarke. Thomas began his A-TEAM career on Nov. 9, 1998, and Tolliver-Clarke started a week later on Nov. 16, 1998. These two experts have a combined total of more than 83 years of supply experience.

Local man is a direct link between supply and maintenance, providing support to keep 97th Air Mobility Wing aircraft fully mission capable. Very few local man shops still exist in the United States Air Force today and Altus Air Force Base is very fortunate to possess this capability.
The shop’s workload is balanced between restocking the local base supply organization and facilitating requests for the manufacture of parts that ground aircraft, 75 percent and 25 percent respectively.

When an aircraft-grounding part is identified, a flightline maintainer orders a part through Decentralized Material Support. If the part is coded “local manufacture”, the maintainer is notified and the action is initiated to begin the manufacturing process.

The local man shop researches the aircraft technical order and retrieves the drawing specifications from the Joint Engineering Management Information Control System. Raw materials, bit and piece parts are acquired. The local man paperwork is initiated and raw materials are delivered to the appropriate manufacturing back shop (e.g. metals technology, sheet metal, pneudraulics, Aerospace Ground Equipment, etc.) for fabrication of the part.

Once the manufacturing process is complete, the paperwork and part are taken to base supply and ultimately delivered to the aircraft tail number bin. The aircraft maintainer retrieves the part and installs it on the aircraft, completing the repair cycle and returning the aircraft to a fully mission capable status for aircrew training.

That is how local man makes the wheels turn!