feature article

August 2006

Loaded With Aging Planes, Air Force Gears Up for Surge in Repair Work

By Sandra I. Erwin

Despite strict mandates to cut thousands of jobs, the Air Force Materiel Command has ambitious plans to modernize its maintenance depots and become less dependent on contractors to repair and upgrade aircraft.

Gen. Bruce Carlson, AFMC commander, says the work at the depots will rise dramatically during the next decade as a result of the service’s aging fleet.

“We’re planning for a significant workload increase,” Carlson told reporters.

AFMC, which is based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, operates three major depots: Ogden Air Logistics Center, in Utah; Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center; and Warner Robins Air Logistics Center, in Georgia.

Overhauls to the KC-135 tanker aircraft alone will drive most of the growth in depot work, said Carlson.

The uncertainty surrounding the purchase of a new tanker means the current fleet will need to be kept in service for at least 25 more years. The current tankers will be rewired, receive new hydraulic lines, spars, support structures and landing gears.

Besides the tanker, other aircraft also will require substantial refurbishments. The F-15C and F-15D fighters will need new avionics in order to extend their service lives by 15 years.

The A-10 ground-attack aircraft will continue to demand repairs as more of the aircraft are deployed in combat. The five-decade old B-52 bomber will stay around for 30 more years.

The surge in depot work reflects the fact that the Air Force is keeping aircraft in service much longer than it ever planned, Carlson said. “Five years ago, when an aircraft came into the depot, the thinking was that it needed to last five more years. Now, as the airplane comes in, the theory is that we have to make it last 15 to 20 more years.”

AFMC is seeking $150 million a year, beginning in fiscal 2008, to modernize the depots and equip them with the necessary tools, machinery and software.

Carlson said he is confident the funds will be approved, but he sounded less optimistic about the long-term availability of skilled workers. AFMC employs 80,000 people — 70 percent civilians. Although it will be losing 3,000 military and 720 civilian employees during the next year, it continues to hire several hundred engineers and expert mechanics each year. “Working with metal is not just technical knowledge. There’s skill and artistry,” said Carlson. “We’re still hiring even when we are drawing down.”

The cutbacks will be achieved via voluntary retirements and, if necessary, layoffs. The 720 civilians must be taken off the payroll by October 1, or AFMC will be stuck with a $154 million bill that it cannot afford to pay. The 3,000 military jobs will be eliminated by the end of fiscal 2007.

The seasoned craftsmen Carlson wants to retain, however, will be deterred from taking the voluntary retirement offer. “The secret is offering it to the right people, so we don’t lose critical skills.”

To further strengthen the depots, Carlson also wants to ensure that the Air Force gets full intellectual property rights to the engineering drawings and designs of any weapon systems purchased from a contractor. Often that has not been the case in the past, because the Air Force in many instances chose to let the contractor retain the rights to the technical data, in exchange for a lower price for the hardware.

That may save money in the near term, but ultimately costs the Air Force untold billions of dollars that it has to pay to contractors to repair and maintain aircraft, Carlson explained. If the Air Force owned the technical data, it would have the option to let its depots bid for the work. He cited the Air Force’s decision to not purchase the engineering specs of the B-1 bomber, the SR-71 spy aircraft and the C-17 cargo plane as cautionary tales.

“When we acquire weapon systems, are we forward thinking enough to buy the tech data, the specs, the line drawings, the tooling?” he asked. “We’ve made conscious decisions to not do that in our past programs. That is coming home to roost in some cases.”

If the Air Force, for example, saves $50 million by not buying the technical data upfront, it eventually may have to pay $500 million for repair work, “because the contractor’s got you by the back of the neck,” Carlson said. “I’m working hard to influence our acquisition arm to make those investments upfront.”

The upcoming procurement of the Army-Air Force “joint cargo aircraft” could serve as a test case for Carlson’s argument. The Air Force is expecting the companies bidding for the JCA contract to offer options for the service to get full rights to the technical drawings, he said. “If we don’t buy the tech data upfront, five years from now, we’ll have the problem we face today when we want to get the airplanes into the depot but we won’t have the trained workforce and technical specs, information on where to get parts, how to do the wiring. Then we will find ourselves behind the eight-ball, paying a contractor at a rate that goes up 10 to 12 percent a year, instead of a fixed price we can get in a depot.”

Another reason why the Air Force should bolster its in-house depots is to protect itself from the vagaries of the global marketplace. “If I have to depend on a contractor that goes broke and then the second source is a foreign country, I have to be ready for that contingency,” said Carlson.

The issue of technical data rights is exceedingly complex and currently the subject of a House bill that would require the Defense Department to acquire unlimited rights to the technical data of any weapon system worth more than $5 million.

Industry groups have repudiated this measure, and argued that, even though the government should own the rights to technologies it paid to develop, the House provision would jeopardize the government’s ability to purchase commercial items from companies that develop technologies at their own expense.

The services, meanwhile, increasingly are seeking to buy commercial aircraft. Programs such as the JCA, the Army’s light utility helicopter and the Air Force combat search and rescue helicopter, are based on the premise that the suppliers could be commercial firms. These companies would not likely be willing to turn over their proprietary data to the government, or would have to charge so much money for it that they would price themselves out of the market, said James McAleese, a defense industry analyst in McLean, Va.

Military buyers and contractors could negotiate technical rights on an ad-hoc basis, and the government usually has the upper hand in these situations because suppliers don’t want to risk losing the business, said McAleese. But he noted that subcomponent providers that supply commercial products typically do not release their tech data for competitive reasons.

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