Saab and FMV Extend Support and Maintenance Contract for Gripen

On the same subject

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  October 29, 2018 | International, Aerospace

  KC-135s and C-130Js are the next aircraft to enter the Air Force’s data-driven maintenance program

  By: Jeff Martin The KC-135 refueling tanker and the C-130J airlifter will be the next two aircraft to be part of the Air Force's predictive maintenance program, part of the service's effort to do maintenance before airplanes break--and improve mission capable and availability rates, according to Air Mobility Command's logistics director. "The bottom line is to get to where we are scheduling all of our maintenance, rather than reacting to the maintenance,' said Brig. Gen. Steven Blaymaier, who oversees Air Mobility Command's logistics, engineering and force protection, in an interview at the 2018 Airlift Tanker Association symposium outside Dallas, Texas. “We want our units to achieve their mission-capable rates on a sustained basis.” According to the latest available data, from FY2017, the KC-135 fleet had, on average, a 74 percent mission capable rate, and the C-130J fleet had a 77 percent mission capable rate. As for the rest of the mobility fleet, by that same data, the C-5M fleet stood at 60 percent, the C-130H fleet was at 73 percent, and the C-17 fleet was at 84 percent mission capable. The concept, known as conditions based maintenance, has already been rolled out to the C-5 fleet within AMC, and the B-1 fleet in Air Force Global Strike Command. It uses algorithms based on reams of data to create models to predict when a part might break, rather than waiting for it to fail. Its a standard practice in the commercial aviation industry, and is now making its way into the Air Force. Blaymaier says the KC-135 fleet will join the program in spring of 2019, and the C-130J fleet will follow in the summer. Blaymaier also added that the other aircraft in AMC's fleet would be joining the program eventually, like the C-17 and KC-10. “They're all in work at their program offices right now,” he said. “What we learn from C-5 will be incorporated into the other aircraft.” Blaymaier also said the Air Force was modelling their effort after Delta Airlines's Tech Ops division's procedures, and that the service was at the beginning or “crawl stage” of the process. He also noted that Delta took “eight years” to get achieve the results they were looking for, and that the Air Force was working on that path. In September, Lt. Gen. Robert McMurray, commander of the Air Force Sustainment Center, told Defense News that the conditions-based maintenance program was critical to increasing the readiness of the Air Force's aircraft. "Given the aging fleet situation that we have, we probably need to be using data better to take care of it — which is a drive toward what most everyone right now is saying is the right way to manage fleet sustainment, which is through condition-based maintenance and data analytics,” he said at the time. Another benefit Blaymaier described was that the service will be able to track maintenance needs by individual aircraft, rather than by a general fleet-wide standard. That could reduce time in depots and increase mission capable rates, a top priority of senior Pentagon leaders. “As we move forward with conditions based maintenance plus (CBM+) and predictive analytics, we'll be able to know by tail number which parts are going to fail on certain aircraft," he said."It'll be much more surgical [and] operational." Blaymaier added that while the transition to conditions based maintenance might be a long journey, it would lead to huge benefits for the Air Force. “Ultimately we want to achieve those aircraft availability standards that we established for each of our fleets that are required to meet our wartime taskings,” he said. https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/airlift-tanker-annual/2018/10/27/kc-135s-and-c-130js-are-the-next-aircraft-to-enter-the-air-forces-data-driven-maintenance-program

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  November 28, 2023 | International, Land

  Elbit Systems Awarded a Contract to Supply DIRCM Self Protection Suites to Airbus Defense and Space for the Installation on MRTT A330 Aircraft for Canada

  Elbit Systems DIRCM laser protection systems have accumulated hundreds of thousands of flight hours on dozens of platforms and provide advanced defensive technology solutions for aircraft operating in modern battlefields.

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  February 10, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  India Prepares For New Fighter Tender

  by Reuben F. Johnson While it is hard to believe, next year will mark almost 15 years since the Indian Air Force (IAF) embarked on a process to procure a new fighter. It will also be eight years since the force selected the Dassault Rafale for its Medium-Multirole Combat Aircraft (M-MRCA) program—a selection that was eventually not carried through to a license-production run as originally planned. The M-MRCA effort was planned for a procurement of 126 fighters by the IAF with an option for 63 additional units. All but 18 of these aircraft were to be license-assembled in India on a Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) production line. In 2012, India eventually selected the Dassault Rafale from a competition that included Russia's Mikoyan MiG-35, the Saab JAS-39E from Sweden, the Eurofighter, and both the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet and a developed version of the Lockheed Martin F-16. The latter two are U.S. products. REPLACEMENT CRISIS However, in “winning a competition” such as this, a French industry official told AIN, “you do not really ‘win' anything. What you supposedly win is the right to then sit down and negotiate a contract—and if you cannot come to some agreement, then you get nothing after having spent tens of millions [of dollars] for all the years it takes to bid a major program in a place like India.” By 2015 the two sides had not come to an agreement on localized production, and in 2016 the new government of prime minister Narendra Modi ordered 36 Rafales “off-the-shelf,” the first of which has already been officially handed over to India. Seven of the aircraft should be delivered to the IAF between April and May 2020. This, however, still leaves the force woefully short of the force levels it says are needed to meet New Delhi's national security requirements. There is still no suitable replacement for the older (but modernized) MiG-21 Bison aircraft in service. There is also no solution to address the gap created by the 2018 Indian decision to withdraw from the HAL/Sukhoi joint program with Russia for a Future Generation Fighter Aircraft (FGFA) program. India was to have purchased 127 of this aircraft, which would have been a heavily-modified version of the Sukhoi Su-57. After an IAF inspection of one of the program's prototypes, the force was calling for 43 major changes to the design to correct what it saw as deficiencies with the original configuration. VERSION 2.0 The consequence is that India—after some twists and turns—is on a path to issue another tender for what will be at least 100 of some aircraft to fill the void created by these developments. Originally, the program was to have been a competition for only single-engine airplane designs, which would have limited the competition to the JAS-39 and the F-16. The latter has now been re-christened the “F-21,” due to all of the changes that have been made to the design to accommodate Indian requirements. One of the changes was to add a probe-and-drogue refueling option in addition to the traditional USAF flying boom refueling method. This “single-engine only” competition was then widened to allow all of the twin-engine aircraft that participated in the original M-MRCA tender—with Russia's Sukhoi Su-35 now also thrown into the mix. This has prompted more than one observer to dub the still-officially unannounced re-running of the tender as “M-MRCA ver 2.0.” NEEDED: A SHORTER ACQUISITION CYCLE What makes this impending competition all the more critical for India's future defense posture is that the next-generation of aircraft carriers that will be coming online with the Indian Navy that will require a force of CATOBAR (catapult-assisted take-off barrier-arrested recovery) fighter aircraft. Both the Rafale-M and Boeing's Super Hornet are available for this mission and Saab has a design for a carrier-capable Maritime Gripen variant of the JAS-39E on the shelf that can be realized within a short time frame. What remains to be seen is whether or not a new tender can be carried out without making it a repeat of the arduous seven-year process that the original M-MRCA turned out to be. Suggestions had been made last year that a new tender could be carried out without an extensive set of flight trials to shorten the evaluation and down-select cycles. While there is no agreement on which aircraft type or types fit the requirements of both the IAF and the Indian Navy, there are numerous observers both inside and outside of India who disparage the manner in which the selection of a new fighter type has been carried out. “As it stands now, the methodology for buying a new fighter is an objectively dysfunctional process,” said one Indian aerospace expert. “The problem is that it will never change as long as the OEMs keep rewarding those who propagate that process without demanding that it change.” https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/defense/2020-02-06/india-prepares-new-fighter-tender