One Airman’s Problem Turns into Environmentally-Friendly Solution

By Julie Weckerlein

It started because an Air Force senior master sergeant got stranded with a dilemma.

The sergeant was a F-16 crew chief stationed at Aviano Air Base, Italy, who had a hydraulic pump fail on his aircraft 350 miles from base. He had to use four barrels of fluid to flush and fill it, and all the equipment to fix the aircraft. He then couldn’t get rid of the waste fluid because there was no way to dispose of it, and had to rent a truck and drive it back to the base for disposal.

That incident started the ball rolling onto a path that led to Donald Streeter, an environmental engineer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, who was charged with trying to find ways to reduce the waste streams related to all the products his organization was responsible for buying, as well as dealing with the environmental aspects related to maintenance issues/methods for keeping the Air Force’s aging fleet airworthy. Mr. Streeter first heard about hydraulic fluid purification in 1999, as well as the story of the Aviano Airman having to improvise in an extreme situation.

All of that led to the Air Force’s current hydraulic fluid purification process, which may expand across the entire Department of Defense.

(Information for this entry was provided by Mr. Streeter and Laura McGowan of the 88th Air Base Wing, Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio.)