Perhaps I could follow the leads of Gums and Orca and offer a few thoughts that may generate some thought on an important but seldom understood topic - military aircraft utilisation.
Managing fleets of military aircraft should not be an incredibly difficult task. As long as you have a clear and stable set of mission requirements, a well understood set of mission configurations, and a disciplined and structured approach to modifications, you should be able to achieve good levels of availability. Assuming, of course, well organised support systems and a stable production configuration.
Sadly, these conditions often don’t apply.
F-35 availability is being hit by early instability in its production configuration plus a seriously badly managed avionics software development programme. But that will improve. I agree with Gums and Orca that the figures being presented here aren’t atypical for the early years of a combat aircraft fleet.
What might surprise many people are the seriously bad levels of availability of many modern combat aircraft fleets and the main reason why they are so bad - really poor fleet management in service.
In my direct experience, many UK aircraft fleets have been decimated by poor management of in service configuration, mainly by indiscriminate application of in service modifications. Put simply, if you keep applying ‘mission essential’ mods to various groups of aircraft in a fleet, you can VERY quickly get to the point where you can only generate very low numbers of aircraft for ops. This phenomenon is called ‘fleets within fleets’ and has gone on for years in the UK. The main driver (and I choose these words carefully) is the desire of senior aircrew officers to get ‘new kit’ coupled with an unwillingness to engage with their engineers who are trying to manage the fleets being modified.
This is has been a largely unreported issue in the UK, mainly due to a general lack of understanding or even agreement around terms like ‘availability’, ‘readiness’, ‘serviceability’, ‘capability’, ‘mission ready’ and so forth. That has allowed the issue to evade scrutiny. I personally watched staff officers preparing replies to Parliamentary Questions on fleet availability that were perilously close to outright lies.
How bad are the numbers? My best guess is that no more than 20 to 25 percent of the UK’s main military aircraft fleets could be put in the air in a fully combat ready configuration at any one time. That’s averaged over some fleets that could do better and some that can’t even get to that. For my part, I think it’s an unreported scandal and should be investigated. Thoughts, anyone?
Best regards as ever to all those professional and dedicated service personnel working hard to meet the task,
Engines