Research for Aircraft Maintenance

We report on a few publications that present quantitative conclusions on the impact of aging platforms on maintenance and operating costs. This literature review, though far from exhaustive, is meant to convey the idea that this topic has been examined before, and that work in this area is continuing. Some exploratory analysis of two data sets that were created for this purpose is presented. Both use the individual aircraft as the unit of Observation. One is organized around individual sorties in a particular month; the other contains summary maintenance labor data and is organized by aircraft, by month, for a 10-year period. Both provide additional evidence that maintenance effort raises with aircraft age.

Despite shrinking budgets, the U.S. military is struggling to simultaneously fund force levels, current operations, and an aggressive modernization program. Many believe the military can fund its recapitalization program if cost efficiencies can be achieved from within infrastructure budgets. One way to reduce infrastructure costs is through competition, outsourcing, and privatization. Whether the in-house (or organic) team or the private team wins the contract, the government benefits because the competition lowers costs and increases productivity. This paper examines the maintenance of the Navy's TA-4Js. The value of this analysis is that it allows us to look at a long series of performance and cost data, both for in-house and contractor maintenance. Because we have data on three contractors, we can also examine the effect of changing contractors.

In a previous research, we showed how the Navy can cut the cost of carrier Aviation Consolidated Allowance Lists (AVCALs) by as much as 26 percent without cutting readiness by implementing Readiness-Based Sparing (RBS). The RBS method of selecting inventory allowances is different from the current Demand-Based Sparing (DBS) method in that it links supply resources to aircraft readiness at least cost. Our earlier RBS work prompted the Navy to conduct an at-sea test of an RBS AVCAL on USS AMERICA. The Navy asked us to perform the analysis and report the results. In this memorandum, we analyze how well AMERICA's new RBS AVCAL supported the airwing during its 1993-94 deployment and report our findings. We summarize the results of our analysis and the aviation support lessons we learned. We discuss how RBS AVCALs fit into the Integrated Logistics Support (ILS) system, present our analysis approach, and describe our analysis of mission capable rates, maintenance operations, and cannibalization actions.

A hands-on performance test and a job-knowledge test were developed for CH-46 helicopter mechanics as part of the Marine Corps Job Performance Measurement Project. The purpose of this information memorandum is to disseminate these performance measures to Marine Corps personnel managers, training instructors, and interested researchers who may find them useful. This work comprises two parts: volume I contains the hands-on performance tests, and this volume presents the administrative duties and job-knowledge tests. See also 95 017901.