The plan to keep F/A-18s flying - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

The plan to keep F/A-18s flying

NORFOLK, Va. — Almost 10 years of war have taken a well-documented toll on ground units and their gear. Not nearly as publicized is the wear and tear on naval tactical aircraft — even the Navy’s top-of-the-line Super Hornet.

“The life of the airplane is getting used up fairly quickly,” said Capt. Roy Kelley, commander of Carrier Air Wing 7, who led fliers on back-to-back deployments in 2009-2010. For some of the Super Hornets that made the cruise, he said, “we’re reaching the halfway point of their life. They’re relatively new, and — third deployment — some of them are approaching 3,000 flight hours already.”

It’s a concern, and not just because the newer jets are getting ridden hard. The older Hornets — F/A-18A through D models introduced in 1983 — have already had their service lives extended. These jets must hang around long enough to stock the fleet until they can be gradually retired in favor of the F-35 joint strike fighter, which is years down the road.

“We’re basically operating the aircraft, on average, about 330 hours a year, per airframe,” said Capt. Mark Darrah, the Navy’s F/A-18 program manager. “And that’s about 30 percent more than we expected, annually. And so over time, those hours accumulate.”

Big Navy is working on the problem. A program of real-time and long-range inspections and assessments, service-life extensions and modifications, naval aviation officials say, is aimed at managing fatigue life and keeping Hornets in the air.

As they do, officials insist that safety and reliability will trump all other considerations.

“For airplanes that are operating in the squadrons’ hands, out conducting missions, there are no compromises,” said Capt. Mike Kelly, force materiel officer for Naval Air Forces. “It’s about mission effectiveness, and it’s about safety.”

Navy-wide, 73 of the fleet’s 418 Super Hornets — F/A-18Es and Fs — well exceed 3,000 hours. As of January, the oldest E model had run up 3,450 flight hours while the oldest F has flown 4,350, according to the Navy’s Tactical Aircraft Programs office. Off the assembly line, the Super Hornet has a planned service life of 6,000 hours.

The older Hornets are a greater concern, having already exceeded their current limit of 8,000 flight hours — a figure already extended from the original ceiling. The Navy won’t comment on the readiness rates of deployed jets, said Lt. Aaron Kakiel, spokesman for Naval Air Forces. The data is classified and wouldn’t be available until subjected to a security review.

Mishap rates among older Hornets in which material problems were a factor are down. During fiscal 2010, the Naval Safety Center recorded 0.71 Class A mishaps — which involve loss or life or at least $1 million in damages — per 100,000 flight hours; the average rate since fiscal 2000 is 1.08. No such mishaps have been recorded during this fiscal year.

Filling the gap

The F-35 program remains behind schedule, but less so since Defense Secretary Robert Gates placed the Marine Corps’ F-35B variant, formerly on the fastest development track, to the “back of the queue” behind the Air Force’s F-35A and the Navy’s carrier-capable C model, said Jeremiah Gertler, military aviation specialist with the Congressional Research Service.

The A and C models, Gertler said, previously had been held back in production while the B, considered the most challenging design of the three, received top priority for engineering and testing.

Still, the projected gap created by older Hornets running out faster than F-35s arrive has prompted the Navy to ask for 28 Super Hornets in its fiscal 2012 budget request which, along with money to extend the lives of 150 Hornets, will keep the fleet stocked until the F-35C joins the fleet, Gertler said.

Those older Hornets could, using inspections and repairs, be extended another 600 hours, to 8,600 hours, according to the Navy. Planners, however, have a more ambitious goal: 10,000 flight hours.

The effort to further extend those Hornets has its roots in a decision by Naval Air Systems Command to identify areas that would need attention should an extension occur. This consisted of structural fatigue testing on the aircraft and a seven-year effort, through 2008 and continuing periodically, to tear down selected fleet aircraft to assess the effects of fleet usage.

This work formed the basis of a set of inspection and repair procedures for service-life extension. The program has since been tweaked by Darrah’s shop, adding high-flying-hour inspections to programmed maintenance inspections. As much as possible, Kelly said, officials are trying to bundle the latter two to minimize out-of-service time.

It costs an average of $15 million for each Hornet inducted into the program.

An extension program is only one of the steps planners are taking to reduce future impact on the tactical air fleet, Darrah said.

The others are procedures common to every Navy aircraft: an intensive, phased maintenance program, careful tracking of each airframe’s hours and carrier launches and traps, and sending the best jets forward to the squadrons, which then perform their own juggling act.

“We know exactly how many hours, life-limiting factors, are on each individual aircraft,” Darrah said.

Naval Air Systems Command does a quarterly modification review of each one, with Darrah’s team meeting with one from Naval Air Forces. This group, he said, “literally makes the decisions every quarter on, bureau number by bureau number, what aircraft will be assigned to what units.”

Aircraft projected to require high-flying-hour inspections during the deployment period, for instance, do not go.

Out on the carriers, the monitoring starts with the aircraft itself, which can record many parameters in its mission computer, Kelly said. The data file is downloaded after every flight, providing the squadron with relevant usage information. Thanks to nearly two decades of connectivity improvements, that data is transferred back to Navy and industry officials, who process and analyze it before transferring conclusions to the fleet.

“We can see the fleet in almost real time,” Kelly said.

Each squadron has access to its fatigue information. So, while every airplane deployed with the squadron can handle its “full performance envelope,” as Kelly put it, the squadrons can tweak things with respect to which jets take on which missions — fuel tank and weapons demands, for example.

“We want them to sort of age the population of the aircraft together,” Kelly said.

“Our No. 1 thing is ensuring that we have the data and technical information necessary to ensure that the aircraft that are being flown both on and off of aircraft carriers, and on and off airfields all across the world, are safe,” added Darrah, a veteran naval flight officer. “And that they’re going to be able to execute their mission and remain operationally relevant.”