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Keeping track of…
by John Batchelor
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For the last 50 years, newer fighters have been sold as requiring less maintenance than their predecessors, due to technical advances. As people like Chuck Spinney and the Congressional Research Service have documented, the reverse has been true. Escalating complexity in electronics, engines, wiring, et. al. delivers required capabilities, but creates multiplying points of failure. Each component may be more reliable than its predecessors on an individual level, but the math means they fall short when put together. In addition, the escalating complexity makes fixes in the field more difficult – and sometimes impossible. This shifts more maintenance to large, specialized rear-echelon depots, which in turn requires more transportation of parts, more infrastructure – and either longer turnaround times, a larger parts inventory of expensive equipment, or both.

The result is that each new generation of fighter aircraft not only sports a price tag that rises faster than inflation, it’s also less available for flight. This, in turn, magnifies the impact of the numbers cuts that their higher price tags produce, by creating a drop in operational aircraft that’s even sharper than the drop in replacement purchases. The military’s reaction is to keep numbers up by keeping aircraft in service for much longer periods, hence the aging aircraft issue that plagues the USAF and most other air forces around the globe. New aircraft types are also expected to serve longer, of course, which in turn drives up their initial costs coming out of the design stage. And the flat spin continues…

That decades-long defense death spiral has finally reached a point where it’s prompting musings about the collapse of American TacAir, and European countries with their small and dwindling defense budgets are also strongly affected. If the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter was to have any hope of becoming a commercial and operational success, it needed to change that operating cost dynamic. To do that, Lockheed Martin, BAE, and the international JSF team have turned to embedded HUMS (Health & Usage Monitoring System) diagnostics. Even that probably won’t be enough, absent integration with ALIS – which an IEEE paper has described as “perhaps the most advanced and comprehensive set of diagnostic, prognostic, and health management capabilities yet to be applied to an aviation platform.”

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