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More than a decade of constant combat and the oldest airframes in the history of the service has degraded the Air Force's mission capability to the lowest in recent memory, meaning more work for airmen who must keep them safe to fly and less flying time for planes in need of constant work.
Add to that the devastating effects of sequestration on readiness and flight hours and it's no wonder Air Force leaders are sounding the alarm to Congress and just about anyone who will listen.
The fleet is old. One in four planes is out of service at any given time. And new planes can't come soon enough, Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh said.
"Airplanes are falling apart. I don't care if it's B-1 oil flanges that are breaking and starting fires, or F-16 canopies cracking. There are just too many things [that] are happening because our fleets are too old," Welsh said Sept. 16 during a speech at the Air Force Association's Air and Space Conference outside of Washington, D.C. "They're just flat too old. We have to recapitalize."
The wear and tear of these aircraft show in the mission capable rates of each aircraft. At the beginning of September, one in four aircraft was unavailable for missions due to depot work, a supply shortage or other maintenance issue.
The average age of the fleet, 27.2 years this year, is the oldest in the history of the force.
This has prompted the Air Force to get creative in how it works on its aircraft, and which missions certain aircraft fly.
Some aircraft are taken offline for planned maintenance, which forces planners to balance out the rest of the fleet to keep enough iron available for war, all under the constant threat of sequestration and a Congress unlikely to let the Air Force trim its aircraft.
The age of the fleet and need for upgrades has been felt across the service, from wrench-turners on the flightlines to top officials trying to explain to Congress that maintenance funding is a top priority to keep the Air Force ready to respond to the demands of combatant commanders.
"If I had to say, you know, my number one concern, it would be what will Congress do with our readiness accounts in FY15," Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said in a Sept. 8 interview. "What we try to do is try to continue to drive home the message of why readiness is so important. It's not always obvious to all members [of Congress], because some members feel that, well you fly all the time and you've been in these continuous operations, of course you're ready. What do you mean you're not ready? And then we have to explain there are different levels of readiness for different types of fights. We've been very focused on one form of readiness, but that means other forms have not been able to have as much attention as we would like."
One problem facing Air Combat Command is that it doesn't have enough airmenfor all of the work the aging fleet requires. The service does not have enough maintainers, and many of the maintainers it has are young and inexperienced, outgoing ACC commander Gen. Mike Hostage said.
Most of the airmen working the flightline are apprentices, or skill-level threes, the second of six levels within a specialty. Hostage said there are not enough journeymen and craftsmen — five and seven levels — with the experience needed to tackle the challenges these aircraft present.
Because of the high operations tempo over the past 10 years, the Air Force hasn't had the capacity at home to adequately train airmen in these specialties.The first priority needs to be producing and training airmen to work on the fleet, Hostage said.
"It takes time to grow them," he said.
The challenges are reflected in the aircraft mission capable rates, compiled each year to show the average rate each aircraft type is available.
Through the first half of 2014, the average mission capable rate had dropped from 74.8 percent to 73.3 percent. By September, that rate was back up to nearly 75 percent. But individual aircraft are showing their wear, the data show.
Busy bomber
The least ready aircraft in the Air Force's fleet in fiscal 2014 is also one of its busiest — the B-1B Lancer. The long-range strike bomber saw a mission capable rate of 47.7 percent in fiscal 2014, down from 57.7 percent the year before. The aircraft saw a 23.2 percent break rate in 2014, with 38.4 percent of those fixed within 12 hours.
While these numbers might be be staggering at first glance, there's a lot more to the B-1's operations and how the Air Force handles its Lancer fleet, said Lt. Col. Shane Henderson, the chief of Air Combat Command's B-1 Weapons Sustainment Team.
"Just to give you an idea of the B-1, the average age of the fleet is 27 years old," Henderson said. "It's over its designed life span. Each aircraft has 8,700 hours on them. Over the past 10 years, there's 23,000 hours per year on the fleet. They're doing a lot of flying, and doing a lot of flying in combat environments. ... We've done a good job adapting."
The service flies 62 B-1Bs, stationed at either Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, or Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota. The aircraft has flown extensively in combat in every conflict the Air Force has seen, including recent operations in Iraq. These are largely close air support missions, a type of combat the aircraft was never expected to be involved in when it was originally designed.
"The airplane's a little bit tired," Henderson said. "It's been flying a long time, past its designed life."
Because of this, B-1s are finding "new and inventive ways" of breaking, he said. To combat this, Air Combat Command has several upgrade, maintenance and testing plans for the fleet. These plans take multiple B-1s out of service at a time, contributing to its low mission capable rate.
The upgrades include: a new wheel brake systems improvement program, which will make the aircraft's wheel and brake system 500 percent more reliable. Crews are inspecting and repairing the B-1's wings after discovering cracks on the structure of the wings, along with pre-emptively fixing the skin on the aircraft's wings. These changes are taking place while the Air Force is upgrading the B-1's integrative battle station, which is the largest modification ever done to the aircraft's weapons systems.
The service is also doing full-scale fatigue testing on the B-1s — shaking the aircraft to try to "get in front of structural breaks" and plan around what problems can arise, Henderson said.
"[B-1s] are flying hard, and we have diminishing sources of repair," Henderson said. "They are breaking in ways we haven't seen in the past. ... Because of those mods, over the next couple years you'll see a decrease in mission capable rates by design."
Currently, there are 11 B-1s in depot maintenance at Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma, with an average stay of between 180 and 200 days.
Officials work to coordinate the modifications to coincide with each other to try to decrease the length of time an aircraft is in maintenance, said Chief Master Sgt. Thomas Jenkins, the superintendent of the ACC B-1 Weapons Sustainment Team.
"The wing modifications are done together to maximize the amount of work we're doing while the aircraft is down," Jenkins said. "... We absolutely look for every effort we can to consolidate maintenance."
The idea is to have "short-term pain for long-term gain" by having B-1s stand down for maintenance so they can keep flying at a high operations tempo, Henderson said.
The service's newest bomber, the 20-year-old B-2A Spirit, flew at a mission capable rate of 56.9 percent in 2014, up more than 10 percent from 2013. The oldest, the 52.6-year-old B-52 Stratofortress, is also the most ready, with a rate of 73.6 percent.
Ready Raptor
While the Air Force's bomber fleet is seeing a relatively low mission capable rate for 2014, its fighters have been steady around 70 percent. The service's newest operational fighter, the 6.8-year-old F-22, is at its highest capable rate: 72.7 percent, up from 69.1 percent last year and a low of 60.9 percent in fiscal 2010.
The aircraft's successes stem from a low in its readiness: the full fleet stand down in 2011. The Defense Department ordered the Air Force to ground its entire F-22 fleet for seven months after pilots reported hypoxia-like symptoms during flight. An investigation discovered the root cause of the issue was a faulty valve in the pilot's life support system and the fleet was returned to flight. The silver lining in the grounding was that it gave maintainers time to look at issues they had with the aircraft and find new ways to address them.
Specifically, maintainers addressed a large problem with the F-22: its low-observable technology, or what enables its trademark stealth capability.
"The standdown in 2011 gave us six months to work through LO, to work through that system and apply many, many modifications," said Chief Master Sgt. Richard W. Bailey, the superintendent of ACC's F-22 Weapons Sustainment Team. "... Now, you see a steady climb as the airframe matures and fixes come in."
The passage of time has proven another benefit for the F-22: the maintainers themselves. While the aircraft was just getting started, the maintainers that worked on it were cross-trained from other jets and were relatively new on the job. Now, with the aircraft at an average age of almost seven years, the maintainer workforce has grown up in the program and has developed its own expertise, said Capt. Jason Moehle, the chief of the F-22 Weapons Sustainment Team at ACC.
The fleet has also seen an uptick in its total flying hours as it matures. Officials project Raptors will fly about 29,000 hours in fiscal 2014, up from 26,000 in fiscal 2013.
Other fighters also see their mission capable rates at about the same rate as the Raptor. The Air Force's Eagles, F-15Cs and Ds, are at a capable rate of 73.2 percent and 72.9 percent, respectively. This comes as the F-15s are getting system upgrades to their radars and other avionics, along with structural testing to identify other possible maintenance issues. F-16Cs are flying at a rate of 74.4 percent, which is about the same as they have been for the past several years. The service had planned to upgrade the F-16's radars, cockpit displays and other communications interfaces with the goal to add up to 10 years to each airframe. The upgrade, called the combat avionics programmed extension suite, or CAPES, was dropped from the Air Force's fiscal 2015 budget proposal, while the service instead planned to use money for general live extension programs.
The service's two-seat F-16Ds will see a drop in its mission capable rate, which sat at 71.8 percent before more than half of the aircraft were grounded in mid-August after cracks were discovered in 82 of the 157 jets.
Air Force A-10s, which have been targeted for retirement in the most recent Air Force budget request, flew at a mission capable rate of 75.1 percent in fiscal 2014, with low break rate of 9.3 percent, with 70.4 percent of those fixed within 12 hours.
Ospreys
The mission capable rates for the CV-22 Osprey are "not where we want them yet," a problem caused by how the aircraft are flown in training, said Lt. Gen. Bradley Heithold, commander of Air Force Special Operations Command. For fiscal 2014, CV-22s had a capable rate of 59.3 percent, down from 61 percent the year before.
The command has identified an issue on the aircraft's blades. Osprey crews need to fly like they do in combat, which means extended training in "dirty" areas with dirt and other debris damaging the rotors, he said.
"The issue purely is we are flying them different than we thought we would fly them," he said. "It's a vicious cycle. We gotta train them like you are going to use them in combat. Every mission we fly is a pretty demanding sortie."
The Air Force has 39 CV-22s in its inventory, with 50 total expected. All of the Ospreys will see heavy use, so there will not be any extra for "attrition reserve." If the service can find the funding, it would be helpful to produce three or four more to esnure it has enough able to fly.
"We are going to dent a few of them, so we should be thinking about that before the line shuts down," he said.
Air lifters and tankers
The service's newer air lifters are flying at a high mission capable rate, which will be key as the Air Force looks to drawdown and remove equipment from Afghanistan. The 10.9-year-old C-17 Globemaster III flew at a mission capable rate of 85.6 percent in fiscal 2014, with the 222 jets seeing a break rate of just 2.4 percent. New, 6.3-year-old C-130Js have a capable rate of 80.9 percent, with the older 26.7-year-old C-130Hs at 72.7 percent.
The service's biggest air lifter, the C-5 Galaxy, has seen an increase in its availability, though it is still below its smaller, younger counterparts. The 42.7-year-old C-5A flew at a mission capable rate of 66.9 percent in fiscal 2014, with the upgraded, 27.6-year-old C-5M Super Galaxy flying at 66.4 percent while it receives new avionics and engines.
The service's tanker fleet has kept a steady rate despite constant operations, especially in southwest Asia. The 52.8-year-old KC-135 R, of which the service has 344, kept a mission capable rate of 75.7 percent. The younger, 29.6-year-old KC-10 Extender had a rate of 84.1 percent.
Aging trainers
The Air Force's trainer fleet has continued to see a drop in its mission capability rate, as the service begins its T-X trainer program to try to find a replacement.
The T-38C Talon fleet, which is primarily used for undergraduate pilot training, saw a drop in mission capable rates from 66.2 percent in fiscal 2013 to 59.6 percent in fiscal 2014. The service has 446 of the planes. While the capability rate is low, the fleet saw a break rate of just 6.6 percent, with a 54.1 percent 12 hour fix rate.
The Air Force expects to issue its request for proposals for the new trainer to replace the T-38 in fiscal 2016, with entrants expected to come from several contractors including General Dynamics and Alenia Aermacchi, BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman, and Textron AirLand.
The service needs to balance how it is spending money to modernize and recapitalize the fleet, while keeping its legacy aircraft flying to meet current missions. Under sequestration, all of the service's forced cuts come from operations and maintenance and force structure, Welsh said.
Within the Air Force's high-level planning, the goal is to keep the "must have" recapitalization programs on track — the KC-46A tanker, F-35 fighter and long-range strike bomber. The service's second tier programs should be prioritized as well, including the combat rescue helicopter, joint STARS and T-X trainer.
"We have to stay ready," Welsh said. "And if we go back to sequestered funding levels, the only way we can do that is impact one of those [top programs]. It has to come out of force structure and modernization."
