Tech. Sgt. Emil Wodicka and Tech. Sgt. Kalib McBride

Imagine for a moment you are a fighter pilot. Cool image, right? We’re going to focus on the less exciting parts of it for now. Before you can get up in the air and do the fun part, there are a lot of other steps: Equipment checks. Mission planning. Pre-flight checks.

Only when all that is done do you climb up into the aircraft. At the top of the ladder, you have a moment to take in the scene. This isn’t any fighter plane … it’s the most advanced fighter in the world. The F-35 Lightning II.

Excited, you swing a leg over into the cockpit to get in place and hear a crack. Your boot hit something. It’s the weapons management switch – a tiny, four-pronged selector knob at the top of the throttle. Except now it’s on the floor of the cockpit.

The good news is you’re not alone. Unfortunately, this happens quite regularly. According to U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Emil Wodicka at the 48th Fighter Wing at Royal Air Force Lakenheath in England, the unit had 52 such incidents since receiving the fifth-generation fighter.

The bad news is you probably just made the aircraft “NMC” – a term maintainers use to flag an airplane that is no longer capable of performing its mission.

A simple fix can take up to five hours. A more complex fix might require replacing the $8,000 assembly and take upwards of 5 hours. Even on the low end, a simple repair is doing more than just burning through maintenance hours – it’s preventing the pilot (and the aircraft) from performing their mission. In the European theater, that mission includes flying “alert” defending airspace in support of U.S. European Command.

Every hour an aircraft can’t fly impacts that mission – something Wodicka’s teammate, Tech. Sgt. Kalib McBride, described as “like taking the firing pin out of [EUCOM’s] gun.” With tensions in the European theater at historic levels, the stakes couldn’t be higher for such a simple maintenance issue.

Wodicka is the kind of person you would expect to take on this problem. He has a creative mind and a restless energy you pick up on with even a brief conversation. In February 2023, he had been working on a degree in entrepreneurship and was primed to look for a problem to fix. It turned out the problem would come to him. He had designed and 3D printed a silicone peanut butter spreader that had created some buzz on base.

“People knew what I was doing because I was coming to work with jars of peanut butter with these things attached to the lids,” he said. “It sparked conversations. That’s how someone knew to come to me for this.”

He quickly came up with a simple solution: print a cover for the throttle that snaps onto the throttle like a cellphone case that wouldn’t be removed until the pilot is in the seat. He worked the project at home on the weekends, going through eight versions before he was satisfied to try to implement it.

Wodicka pointed out he had supportive leadership willing to take considered risk on this project because it was an adaptation for the aircraft only during ground operations.

“My maintenance group commander was all for it,” he said. This included approval to incorporate the process into local checklists.

The story gets even more interesting when you zoom out. The F-35, also called the Joint Strike Fighter, is operated by the U.S. Navy (and Marine Corps) as well as more than a dozen allies and partners. If the problem was happening at Lakenheath, surely it was happening elsewhere.

Indeed it was. According to Wodicka, more than 700 incidents across the fleet had been reported since 2016, resulting in more than 1000 NMC hours per year. A small issue was having significant operational impact. It’s no surprise then that the enterprise was hungry for a fix.

Wodicka connected with McBride at the unit level in April and got the project into VISION. From there, it took off. The wing innovation manager saw it and pushed it to the headquarters where it got support from the Innovation Transformation Council and an eventual nod from the deputy commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, Lt. Gen. John Lamontagne.

The project caught the eye of Jay Breyer at AFWERX, who fast-tracked it to the Refinery – a program designed to guide projects through the adoption phase. With their support, Wodicka and McBride got a two-week test and evaluation period to prove the concept and get it out to the broader enterprise.

“In our two-week test, we didn’t kick a single switch off using the cover,” Wodicka said. “The week after we stopped, we kicked four switches off.”

Because of the connections they have made and the significant joint and international impact to the fleet, the project is about to enter a three-month validation period to determine whether Wodicka’s cover is the right enterprise solution.

“We have some good highlights that it’s going to work. “If the answer is yes, we have the ammo we need to get this thing enterprise-wide.”

Throughout the process, VISION has helped make connections.

“We’ve got about a dozen bases that are watching this project currently,” said McBride, noting that VISION replaces the “email game” by making a single place for them to access information on the project.

The F-35 Throttle Cover is the winner of VISION’s 2023 Torch Award for its innovative impact on the joint force.