Pontius ….
"... is the 135 climbing up the other side of the maintenance line?"
I think this problem is not aged airplanes per se. Old age can often be dealt with well enough, though Trigger’s Broom might not always be the most economical solution.
In the current USAF RC-135 Rivet Joint context, it was the more or less accidental discovery by a highly experienced, professionally qualified and inquisitive mechanic, more than ten years ago, that significant scheduled maintenance and defect rectification was not being done, or was being done incompetently. This slack and undesirable practice turned generally serviceable airplanes into unsafe and unairworthy ones and repeats itself as a continuous warning drum-beat in this long-running thread and in similar safety and airworthiness discussions on PPRune
The management, who probably should have been aware of this, reacted badly when it was drawn to their attention internally. Management then ignored the problems that had been uncovered and instead, punished the messenger, who of professional responsibility and necessity, became a whistle-blower. The problem was escalated over several years, though still within government confines, but by all accounts was never fully resolved.
The issue has caught the attention of the Omaha World-Herald via several recent well-informed articles and of the Nebraska Senators and Representatives in DC who have just written to the Secretary of the Air Force, expressing their concerns. If half of it is true, as evidenced by publicly available official documents, it is not before time. I recently saw a long list of repetitive toilet system defects on these airplanes. You know what loose toilet fluids do to airplane metal if not dealt with promptly.
A very persuasive E-book on this specific subject written by the whistle-blower, entitled
‘Cowardice in Leadership’ is still readily available and makes for uncomfortable reading if one believes in the principle of ‘Safety is No Accident.’ Unfortunately the other lesson - ‘If you think Safety is expensive, try having an Accident’ seems to have been expensively discarded as a matter of policy, many years ago, by those who claim to control military air safety, particularly on this side of the Atlantic.
Whether any of these problems read across to the three RAF Rivet Joint RC-135W is anybody’s guess, but without doubt will be within the knowledge of some people. The cooks and the recipes are basically the same so one hopes that the bottle-washers are more on the ball. The type achieved full UK operational capability only this year, so there should be no catch-up backlog for a while – in any department.
As for the six RAF Sentry – E-3D AWACS, where the airframes are half the age of the RC-135s, one hopes that it is only the mission equipment that has been allowed to fall behind (since about year 2000) and that safe airplane maintenance and rectification continue in the best traditions of the Royal Air Force in its 100th year. Judging by some posts on the RAF E-3D AWACS Replacement thread, even the answer to that question is by no means certain.
LFH
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