By Geoff Fein

The Navy is in the process of signing a contract with Massachusetts’s-based KaZak Composites Inc., for the company’s impact recovery post, a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) effort that will be incorporated onto all the service’s aircraft carriers.

The post will replace an existing system used on carriers to keep crew from falling down elevator shafts.

The problem was that when the elevators would descend after unloading aircraft, ordnance or other equipment to the deck, steel poles would automatically rise up to prevent crew from falling into the elevator, John Schickling, company executive vice president, told Defense Daily earlier this week.

“The problem became that the small forklifts that would run around delivering ordnance and moving planes would occasionally back into the poles and bend them,” he said. “When they were bent, the elevator couldn’t go up and down.”

To get around that problem, crews would actually cut them off with a torch or saw, Schickling said.

So the Navy began looking for something that would be able to handle the impact from the forklifts, he added.

“With SBIR funding, over a two-year period, we developed the impact recovery post,” Schickling said.

The impact recovery post effectively had a tip load of approximately 350 pounds, Schickling aid. “You could push it and it wouldn’t move at all. But once that force exceed 350 pounds it would buckle.”

“Consequently these small forklifts could back into [the post], it would buckle and then it would come right back into its original position, maintaining all the structural integrity that it had originally,” Schickling said.

In October 2004, KaZak completed its work on the impact recovery post and two years later in October 2006, the Navy took it out for sea trials on the USS Nimitz, Schickling said.

In February 2008, the Navy notified the company that the sea trials were successful. Three weeks ago, KaZak was told the Navy was going to contract with the company to buy enough impact recovery posts for the entire carrier fleet, Schickling said.

He couldn’t comment on the size of the contract award, or when work would begin, because KaZak has not yet received any paperwork from the Navy.

“It will be a reasonable value, but more importantly, for the company to have it on a ship is very important,” he said. “And it’s achieving the objective the SBIR program is aiming at.”

Schickling anticipates the Navy buying between 100 and 150 impact recovery posts per carrier. And he hopes installation will begin this year.

Although the impact recovery post may not be high tech in the traditional sense of electronics and software, Schickling noted it is high tech from a material sciences point of view.

“Nobody else has done this…been able to do it, and it’s all in the composite manufacturing technology that we have developed and patented, he said. “That makes a very big difference.”

Besides the Navy application, the impact recovery pole has a tremendous opportunity for traffic signage, Schickling added.

KaZak is currently working with the state of New Hampshire and with the city of Nashua, N.H., in planning a beta site for parking meters, he said. “Anywhere you have a steel post that is susceptible to being bent, this would be an option.”

Schickling said that for a company the size of KaZak, SBIRs are an outstanding opportunity for small businesses, “which generally have pretty bright people and can move pretty quick without the normal bureaucracy and political environment that exists in larger organizations.”

“[The] ultimate goal, from a congressional point of view, is [about] creating jobs…GNP,” he said. “In our case we are increasing the manufacturing base, so that is very positive.”

Without SBIRs, it would be difficult for companies the size of KaZak (40 employees), to exist, Schickling said.”For instance, we’ve probably done close to 100 SBIRs over 15 years. Even if you round it up and say the average includes Phase I and Phase II, that’s $50 million the company never would have been able to do,” he said. “You are not going to get independent funding for something you haven’t developed.”

KaZak is under contract for another product, the hybrid stanchion, the company developed for the Navy’s T-AKE program to secure loads. “We are providing approx 10,000 of these products for each ship. “It’s used in securing loads in the hold.”

T-AKEs transport dry cargo, everything from ordnance to cigarettes, to food, Schickling said.

“They have a grid in the floor and a grid in the ceiling, and effectively the stanchion we developed locks into the floor. It’s a hybrid a combination of composites and aluminum. It locks into the floor and snaps into the ceiling,” he said.

KaZak has delivered six ship sets of hybrid stanchions already, Schickling said. And the company is under contract to provide all the Navy’s T-AKEs with the technology.