By Geoff Fein and Emelie Rutherford
Facing a shortfall of at least 69 strike fighters by 2015, the Navy is undertaking a number of efforts to ensure that it will have a sufficient number of tactical aircraft before the arrival of the carrier variant of Lockheed Martin‘s [LMT] F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF).
Much of the projected shortfall, or gap, the Navy will see in its strike fighter fleet over the next decade is due to the legacy Boeing [BA] Hornets aging, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
The shortfall is expected to be about 69 aircraft in the Navy in the 2015-2016 time frame. That number will likely grow when the Marine Corps Hornets are added in, Roughead said.
To counter the drop in strike fighter capability, the Navy has begun efforts to examine how much more life it can get out of not only the earlier model Hornets, but from the newer F/A-18E/F Super Hornets.
Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) has been conducting a Service Life Extension Program (SLEP) on the A through D model Hornets. There are 643 total A through D Hornets in the combined Navy and Marine Corps inventory, Capt. Mark Darrah, F/A-18E/F and EA-18G program manager, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
The first phase of the Service Life Assessment Program (SLAP) looked at reaching a service life goal extension for carrier launches, arrested landings, and total landings. According to Darrah, that SLAP gave the Navy a set of inspections, air frame changes, and air frame bulletins that could be used to extend the life of the legacy Hornets.
“Those goals are 2,700 catapults and arrested landings, and 14,500 total landings,” he said.
Phase two of the effort looked to extend the flying hours of the Hornets from 6,000 hours out to 10,000 hours, Darrah added.
That effort will be completed in May, he said.
The Navy needs to have 44 strike fighters in each one of its carrier wings, Rear Adm. Mark Skinner, program executive officer, tactical aircraft programs, told reporters last week at the annual Navy League Sea Air Space expo in Washington.
“When we look at that over time, how many of these 1,000 Hornets that we bought, when they’ll come down and we’ll have to retire them…when we look at the aircraft that we’re buying and we bounce that off of how many aircraft that we need,” Skinner said. “Because if you need 44 strike fighters and 10 carrier air wings or 11, you need to have so many in [the pipeline] and you need to have a certain population. And then you do the math to try to manage that to where that existing population is a viable fighting force.”
According to Skinner, among the Navy, Marine Corps and seven Foreign Military sales customers, there are about 1,000 legacy Hornets in use today.
“They all came out in different blocks. And so the concept is, how do you take an aircraft that’s say current today, or let’s say it’s one that was current five years ago. That aircraft, we try to manage by flight hours. Other people manage different ways,” he said. “We cross-correlate our flight hours, though, and one of the things that SLAP gives us is a correlation between flight hours and wing right fatigue life expenditure (RFLE), so wing RFLE. And so what we can do is basically say, we’re flying about 300 to 400 hours a year on our birds and how long it’ll last. And so what we’re trying to do, though, is project the aircraft’s total life, based on how many hours we put on it per year, and then say, maybe the systems that we put into it originally are not going to be effective against the threat 10, 15 years from now.”
In the end, it comes down to sort of a business-case value judgment, Skinner told Defense Daily. “Do I keep the high-fatigue-life, mission-system-effective jet, or do I take a low-fatigue-life, less-mission-capable jet and put mission systems into that jet?”
That has led the Navy to manage this effort on a bureau-by-bureau number, he added.
“But the interesting thing about what we’re trying to do is, if you can imagine taking all the maiden Hornets and plotting them on an axis where the X-axis is flight hours and the Y-axis is fatigue life expended, what you come up with is–we call it a cloud chart,” Skinner explained.
What the Navy has done is created a system where for each bureau number personnel know how much fatigue life has been expended and how many hours an aircraft has on it. “We’ve taken a look at our own missions that we fly on the Hornet, and we know which ones are high-fatigue-life missions and low-fatigue-life missions, and we put this data down to squadron level, and we’ve asked the squadrons to manage very smartly,” Skinner said.
“On the big spectrum of things, we’re trying to make the right decision the majority of the time. So if a maintenance material control chief or a maintenance master chief down in the maintenance control in one of our fighter squadrons knows he has to put a jet against an air-combat-maneuvering mission that day, and he has this chart, he’ll pick one of his low-fatigue-life jets on the ramp to go do it,” he added.
The other way to do it is to buy new, either buy Super Hornets new or to buy new JSFs, Skinner said. “So there’s a whole bunch of ways to get strike fighters on your carrier deck.”
“All those variables can change on a budget cycle, on a key decision-maker’s decision, that variable chain can change. So what we try to do is, we try to manage each and every one of those,” he said. “So we want to put ourselves in a position so that if we do have to modernize those jets, and put in the structural changes, we can do it. But can I give you an exact number of the ones we do? I don’t know. I mean if the money truck pulled up to the Department of the Navy and dumped a whole bunch of money on our doorstep, and told us to go buy 500 new JSFs, carrier versions, we’d probably do it. And then I wouldn’t have to do all this stuff. But usually what we do is we see a little bit of that and a little bit of this and the whole game in town is to put the right number on the deck. So it’s very much a work in progress.”
While the Navy works to extend the life of its legacy Hornets out another 10 years, any further movement to the right by the JSF program could require the Navy to seek more life from its Hornets.
“Our business is to ensure we are always ready…and so, of course, we are always looking at ‘what if’ scenarios,'” Darrah said.
“It’s important for us to understand the interdependencies we have with other platforms, and JSF is one of those, so we are always looking at what will the impact be. There already has been some perturbation in their schedule,” he said.
The Navy has been able to work around the changes in JSF’s schedule through efforts like the Service Life Management Program (SLMP), he added.
“[The CNO] acknowledged we have a shortfall that we have to work around and figure out how we are going to deal with it,” Darrah added. “That shortfall may be dealt with by buying more JSFs, sooner, if possible, or other platforms.”
The Navy has tons of excursions they are continually running to make sure they are prepared to deal with anything that may happen with the JSF schedule, he said.
The Navy put strain gauges throughout the Hornets to track every single bureau number’s utilization, Darrah said.
“So we know exactly what the population is doing. If we had not done that, we would have a much more difficult time dealing with any perturbation that is going to happen with the JSF program,” he said. “We know exactly how we are utilizing our fleet right down to the bureau number.”
Since the Navy found there is an ability to extend the life of the Hornets, the service is now looking to do a similar assessment with the Super Hornet.
“It’s not because we are concerned about it doing what it is supposed to. It’s just because we are going to try to get as much life out of the aircraft as we can. That’s just the smart thing to do,” Darrah said.
FY ’08 is the first year that the president’s budget had a SLAP for the Super Hornet. The budget included approximately $15 million for the study, Darrah said.
“It’s just a study phase to determine what are the areas we would have to focus on, just like we did with the A through D program,” he said.
The F/A-18E/F SLAP will begin in May, just as the phase two SLEP on the legacy Hornets is ending, Darrah pointed out.
“We are going to do parallel work. The A through D…[we] expect phase 2 to be done in May. [We] will [then] begin the SLAP on E/F right away,” he said.