Case Studies

Gravity drain bowsers leave jet fuel exposed to the air, the ground, and the technicians on the wing. Spokane Stainless Technologies’ SealVac line replaces that open drain with a sealed path from the aircraft’s sump into a double-walled collection tank. Fairchild AFB, a Royal Australian Air Force C-130 base, a U.S. Coast Guard air station, and a major U.S. commercial carrier have all cut exposure time and spill risk as a result, including over twenty hours saved on a single C-130 external tank drain.

An airline-operated heavy maintenance facility partnered with Spokane Stainless Technologies (SST) to replace its failing gravity drain bowsers with a fundamentally faster approach to aircraft defueling. The SealVac Vacuum Fuel Drain Bowser cut full-aircraft defuel time from 8–12 hours to 2–3 hours, and the maintenance crew proved it before the operating procedure was even finished, defueling an entire wing while the facility’s engineers stepped away to draft the paperwork.

The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) partnered with Spokane Stainless Technologies (SST) to fundamentally reimagine military fuel recovery. Through design-thinking sessions and iterative engineering with Air Force maintenance crews, SST developed the SealVac system—a breakthrough technology that eliminated fuel spills, protected personnel from vapor exposure, and standardized operations across global military installations.

The 1106th Theater Aviation Sustainment Maintenance Group partnered with Spokane Stainless Technologies to deploy the M600 RFOS—a self-contained, sealed fuel operations system with direct sump-drain coupling and dual-stage aviation-grade filtration—that cut defueling time dramatically and improved readiness.