OFFUTT AIR FORCE BASE, Neb, -- In today's Air Force, innovation is key to maintaining operations in environments often limited by budget and time.

"We have had budget cuts and we're the smallest Air Force we've ever been," said Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James during a Q-and-A session with Fox News at the sixth annual, three-day Aspen Security Forum in Colorado July 24. "Whatever we are called upon to do, we will step up to the plate, we will send our most effective and our best trained personnel and most modern capabilities, and we will get the job done."

The 95th Reconnaissance Squadron, stationed out of RAF Mildenhall, takes this idea very seriously.

"During one of our morning production meetings back in September, I was told that a piece of test equipment we needed to fix a broken aircraft couldn't be accessed because it was in the MegaLift, which had recently stopped working," said Capt. Lexie Greene, the maintenance operations officer of the 95th Reconnaissance Squadron. "The MegaLift is a $25,000 vertical storage system and it holds approximately $2 million worth of our equipment."

This was, in effect, a big deal - made only bigger once the squadron received a contractor quote for repairing it. Troubleshooting and repairs combined to the grand total of $6,800, with an estimated down time of three weeks for the squadron.

"The MegaLift stores a significant amount of our special tools and test equipment that we use to perform maintenance on the RC-135 and its variants," Greene said. "There is some equipment we can borrow from the host wing here at RAF Mildenhall, but some of it is specifically for our airframe so they don't have everything we need. The bottom line is that if we didn't have those tools and equipment to fix the aircraft, then they wouldn't be able to fly."

Spending almost $7,000 was out of the question, as was waiting three weeks to resume normal operations. Fortunately, the unit wasn't ready to accept that solution. Master Sgt. Randy Hailer, the sortie generation section chief, contacted the Air Force Repair and Enhancement shop at RAF Lakenheath. Later that day, Tech. Sgt. Nathaniel Jordan and Staff Sgt. Terry Valentine, both with AFREP, arrived at Mildhenall. After examining the issue, they troubleshot it down to a bad power supply in the control panel. 

Hailer said the team worked with speed and confidence.

"It took them less than an hour to troubleshoot everything using the German documentation and finding the fault," he said. After they isolated the problem, they applied for funding, which was quickly approved. "They were right back out here at 10 a.m. the next day. By 10:30, everything was good as new."

By making use of the resources AFREP offered, the squadron had saved themselves time and money.

"We went from a projected $6,800 cost and three week downtime to just over $140 and 48 hours from the time it stopped working," said Greene. "The three weeks also doesn't account for the time it would have taken us to secure funding for the repair. My team could have easily thought there was nothing we could do, and they would have pressed with getting approval for the contractor repair - but we are constantly trying to find ways to save our squadron and the Air Force money. We understand that every dollar truly counts and if we can find ways to create savings then we are being better Airmen and better stewards of taxpayer dollars."