MARIETTA, Ga. –
The Defense Contract Management Agency’s Fixed Wing Marietta contracting office and Lockheed Martin Aeronautics recognized employees from each respective organization Dec. 17, 2025, for their contributions to improving the C-130J Super Hercules delivery schedule.
The Marietta Joint Advisory Group, comprised of local DCMA and LM Aero senior leaders and functional experts, presented the 2025 Snow‑Rhyant Leading in Excellence Award to Christopher Blackman, supervisor of the DCMA Software, Pricing and Program Support Team, and to LM Aero’s Curtis Jones, director of Program Management for Air Mobility and Maritime Missions.
The award is named for Lee Rhyant, a long‑time LM Aero executive who led the Georgia-based facility from 2000 to 2011 and Henrietta Snow, former deputy commander of DCMA Lockheed Martin Marietta, now DCMA Fixed Wing Marietta, whose tenure from 2004 to 2014 overlapped with Rhyant’s.
The award recognizes leadership and service within the Marietta facility, reflecting a collaboration between Department of War oversight and corporate execution.
The honorees received recognition for their leadership of the “Aircraft Diminishing Manufacturing Sources and Configuration Oversight” project. DMS and configuration changes to production aircraft were challenges that caused the Air Force to halt deliveries resulting in LM Aero delivering just two C-130J’s in 2025. Blackman and Jones established and co-led a joint team to proactively solve the configuration challenges with deliveries, which restarted on March 27.
One solution involved working more closely with the local DCMA flight operations team. Blackman’s efforts to create a configuration change matrix and turn it over to the flight operations team ensured accurate information and communication.
"By increasing the flight operations team’s involvement in LM Aero’s configuration management process and giving them advanced awareness of upcoming changes prior to aircraft reaching the flight acceptance stage, we helped minimize impacts to their flight acceptance testing schedule,” said Blackman.
Blackman and Jones also led two other high‑impact initiatives, which were captured in their award nomination. The first involved improving enterprise communication between LM Aero, DCMA and program executive office representatives by optimizing information flow for more efficient collaboration. The second initiative involved streamlining the process for swapping government-furnished equipment and contractor-furnished equipment to resolve inefficiencies that can lead to duplicate purchases and costly delays.
Blackman and Jones mapped the process, established necessary timelines and created a matrix of commercial parts and government aircraft parts that would potentially need to be exchanged. In doing so, their plan minimizes unnecessary expenditure by ensuring all stakeholders know what actual components need to be purchased and when they will be installed.