Missile Maintenance

Missile Maintenance. Ronald Reagan Minuteman Missile State Historic Site -. The Minuteman missile system depended upon knowledgeable and skilled maintainers to ensure its reliability. Missile maintenance was divided into a number of specialized fields. Air Force enlisted personnel were placed on one of the specialized teams and then received extensive and rigorous training in their team's specialty., Electro-Mechanical Team (EMT) - With broad and in-depth training on numerous pieces of the weapon system, the EMT was responsible for troubleshooting and repairing nearly every portion of the system including: electronic security systems, command and control communication systems, electronic support equipment, power supply systems, and various other ancillary equipment. EMT was involved the vast majority of the maintenance work that occurred in the missile field. , Missile Maintenance Team (MMT) - The duties of the MMT placed great physical demands on the members. MMT members often found themselves with the hazardous duty of entering the interior of the launch tube on a "diving board" or work cage that brought them up close to the missile. On these small platforms, suspended nearly 80 feet above the silo floor, the MMT maintained: missile umbilical's (cables and wires that connected the missile to the surrounding support equipment), the missile suspension system, and the ballistic gas actuators (used to open the launcher closure door). The MMT was also responsible for removing the top portions of the missile, including the re-entry vehicle, war heads, and the missile guidance set (computer). , Missile Handling Team (MHT) - The MHT had the stressful duty of transporting missiles between the Grand Forks Air Force Base and the Launch Facilities (November-33, one of the 150 LFs, is 71 miles from the base). The MHT loaded the missile into the transporter - erector (either hoisting it out of the LF or loading it at the air base (and then drove the missile, through all kinds of weather conditions and over all kinds of roads, to its destination. MHT played a critical role in the early 1970s when the missiles were upgraded from the Minuteman II to the Minuteman III and in the 1990s when all of the missiles were removed from the LFs prior to silo implosion. , Facility Maintenance Team (FMT) - The primary responsibility of the FMT was ensuring the LFs and Launch Control Centers (LCCs) had a constant supply of power and cooling air. The FMT ensured the sites properly received commercial power (from the local power company); should that fail, they ensure the diesel generators would reliably provide backup power. The FMT also ensured the air conditioning systems at the LFs and LCCs were functional. The age electronics at the sites would rapidly overheat without sufficient air conditioning - FMT ensured those air losses rarely occurred. FMT members could also find themselves on Corrosion Control Teams (CCT) and Periodic Maintenance Teams (FMT). , EMT, MMT, MHT, FMT, CC, and PMT were only come of the maintenance teams that made up the alphabet soup of missile maintenance teams. Some other teams included: Pneudraulics (PNEU), Power Refrigeration and Electronics (PREL). Electronics Lab (E-Lab), Communication Maintenance Teams, civilian contractors like Rivet MILE, and others. The critical role that the maintainers filled to keep the Minuteman missiles operational and "on-alert" cannot be overstated. , Photo captions , A facility maintenance team member of the 448th Missile Squadron, at Grand Forks Air Force Base, takes a voltage reading on a circuit breaker that supplies power to a launch control center (1995). , Members of a missile maintenance team with the 321st Strategic Missile Wing, at Grand Forks Air Force Base, guide the re - entry system for a Minuteman III missile onto a missile guidance set (1990). , At the Launch Facility, the launcher's heavy blast door is rolled back, and missile handling team members erect a metal barrier along the exposed launcher opening (1990). , Forty feet below ground in a missile silo, missile maintenance technicians, one in a work cage and another standing on a "diving board," replace a post-boost control system n a Minuteman missile (1997).