Lockheed Martin completes personnel employee safety project for Boeing

Mar. 23--Lockheed Martin is about to complete work in Richland on a $3.5 million contract to supply a safety system to Boeing Corp. for workers in confined spaces.

The system, called LMsafelink, was installed first at Boeing's Everett plant in December. The company liked the system enough to install it at its Long Beach, Calif., plant next, and will have it operating in June at its Renton site, said Kyle Willers, chief engineer at Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technical Solutions in Richland.

For the contract awarded in August 2006, Lockheed developed a cost-effective system for Boeing to meet confined spaces requirements of the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Workers who might have to crawl into wings and do work using chemicals might need two or three people observing them, Willers said. But LMsafelink allows them to be constantly monitored using technology.

Lockheed used off-the-shelf, two-way radios and radio frequency identification technology as the basis for the system. Then it developed software to interface with the radio, converting signals from voice to computer information and computer information to voice, Willers said.

An employee using LMsafelink in a confined space has to talk into the radio or push buttons at intervals to indicate that he or she is fine. If there is no response from the worker, an alarm goes off.

Monitors also can send alerts such as "exit" or "evacuate" to one worker or a group.

The radio frequency identification technology can be used if there's a problem "so an emergency crew knows exactly what they're dealing with," Willers said.