Reusable Wash Covers for F-22 Raptor

Routine maintenance for the F-22 Raptor requires routine aircraft washes to ensure the integrity of its stealth coating, especially in humid or salt-laden climates. To prevent damage to the aircraft, maintainers are required to cover all flight critical areas with single use barrier paper and tape, a time and material inefficient process. Thorough aircraft inspections are then required to ensure all tape has been removed after the wash, as a piece of residual tape contributed to an F-22 crashing shortly after takeoff due to inaccurate sensor data (2020). Kennon is proposing a set of reusable, fully sealed, magnetic wash covers to protect each flight critical area on the aircraft. By removing the need to tape each area the proposed shipset can reduce maintainer time by an estimated 75% per aircraft per wash. Kennon has developed a low profile magnetic attachment currently in use on F-22 and F-35 which can secure and seal the proposed system to the aircraft without damaging the LO coating, contains no moving parts, and requires no modifications to the aircraft.