TEL NOF AIR BASE, Israel -- The 435th Construction and Training Squadron and the Israeli Air Force came together for Mobile Aircraft Arresting and P4 systems Audit 2022, a training event focused on aircraft arresting systems held March 20-24, 2022.
“It was nice to see how a different military operates,” said U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Rafael Crespo, aircraft arresting systems supervisor. “Every opportunity you have like that, whether it’s the German military or [Israeli], you learn about different things from them that you did not think about before.”
During the training event, instructors like Tech. Sgt. Robert J. Miller, 435th Construction and Training Squadron Aircraft Arresting Systems Depot supervisor, and Crespo taught around 30-40 service members from all over Israel on MAAS installation procedures and streamlined their current process.
“There was no real lead [of the course],” Crespo said. “We collaborated on what we wanted to talk about to make sure we were saying the right things.”
The first day the duo was shown a tour of the base systems and how the Israeli MAAS installation process currently operates so they could show the Israeli service members how the process could be more efficient. The remaining days the team put their training into practice, installing a new aircraft arresting system with the knowledge gained from the 435th CTS.
“The major there told me the process would sometimes take up to a week or more to do the installations,” Crespo said. “We were able to organize their process and get their time limit down to a day.”
Trained service members are now equipped with the expertise to disperse to their own home bases so each base is able to become more efficient and stop more aircraft in case of emergency.
Future collaborations between the two units are not on the schedule yet, but the field of construction and training is full of surprises.
“We have to be very flexible here,” Crespo said. “In the morning, I could say, ‘Hey sergeant, I need you to work on this build.’ By the afternoon I would say, ‘Hey sergeant, I need you to get a unit type code ready to go out the door.’ A lot can change in a day.”