FLEET MANAGEMENT


MAKING THE MOST OF MAINTENANCE


CW3 Shaun Steines, a Maintenance Test Pilot in Task Force Attack, 1st Air Cavalry Brigade, per- forms a track and balance procedure on Night Fury, the first AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopter in the U.S. military to reach 10,000 flight hours, at Forward Operating Base Sharana, Afghanistan, July 21, 2011. A track and balance is performed after a 125-hour scheduled maintenance event to make sure the rotor blades are properly balanced. Fleet management is a proactive approach that enhances platform visibility by gathering and analyzing data with the goal of reducing the maintenance burden on the Soldier. (Photo by SSG Joe Armas, 1st Air Cavalry Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division Public Affairs.)


maintenance management, then dis- carded every six months. The collection and movement of these data are moving from the flight line to the enterprise. The Navy’s Joint Technical Data Integration technology is facilitating this data flow.


GREATER VISIBILITY


A main goal of FM is to gain visibility and begin to understand what our maintain- ers must overcome to launch and recover aircraft. Until recently, institutional mechanisms have had limited ability to see fleet trends.


The field traditionally communicates issues via Product Quality Deficiency Reports, DA Form 2028s, user conferences, “911” calls to the PMs, unit visits, demand analy- sis, and other limited, reactive measures.


Aviation’s monthly readiness report offers very limited visibility of real issues, events, and failures experienced by our maintain- ers. For example, it does not track mission aborts, mission effective failures, or precau- tionary landings. For FM to be effective, these events must be recorded, understood, and correlated with their causes.


ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS Our Engineering Directorate’s reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM) engineers are now analyzing data using the Aviation Systems Assessment Program (ASAP), which will identify reliability, maintenance man-hours, mission effec- tive failures, mission aborts, and cost drivers. ASAP thus will enable us to bet- ter understand what maintenance is being conducted, why, and at what cost.


All aircraft or systems maintenance pro- grams are built primarily upon condition monitoring—periodic inspections or functional tests to identify impending fail- ures. This method used the failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA)


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Army AL&T Magazine


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