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PEO Spotlight: Keeping an Aging Fleet Flying

A U.S. Air Force PEO focuses on maintaining assets in a pinched budget environment.

Air Force One departs Maxwell Air Force Base in March. The Air Force eventually will replace the aircraft with 747s—but not until 2023.

Sustainment costs worry Kevin Buckley much more than upfront program procurement costs ever will, especially as he works to keep the U.S. Air Force’s aging fleet of transport aircraft flying and juggles issues such as obsolete replacement parts and a fatigued work force spread thin.

“It’s a challenging mission,” says Buckley, the program executive officer for Air Force Mobility Programs in the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. He adds that the military will be relying more and more on industry partners to ease fiscal pressures. To that end, he recommends that companies desiring to pique Air Force acquisition executives’ interest should focus efforts on solutions that can increase system reliability, as well as open-source offerings.

“I’m interested in the real bread-and-butter basics of flying,” Buckley says. “I’m looking for industry to come to me with better ideas on reducing life-cycle costs on platforms. It’s the operating costs … that are, in the long run, the biggest attributes I’m concerned about.”

His office is responsible for acquisition category (ACAT) 1, 2 and 3 programs in the mobility aircraft portfolio, which includes the C-5, C-17, C-27J, C-130J, C-130 Legacy and Mature and Proven Aircraft. Additionally, the office manages aircraft for senior military and legislative personnel, such as Air Force One, and the service’s training aircraft. “When you combine all of the traditional mobility … and the training aircraft, that’s essentially 40 percent of the tails of the Air Force’s air fleet,” Buckley says.

Today, he and other officials seek open-architecture systems. “While I see some pretty interesting avionics solutions that industry has to offer, if they run proprietary software or proprietary architectures, I’m much less interested because I don’t want to have to be locked into doing business with that specific vendor for the rest of the life of the aircraft,” he says. This approach is part of an endeavor called “owning the technical baseline,” in which the Air Force strives to reduce its reliance on sole-source vendors for future platforms.

In the future, Buckley also hopes that aircraft reliability and availability will be more consistent, as rates vary greatly depending on the mobility platform. For example, the president’s aircraft, Air Force One—for obvious reasons—is always at the ready, while the availability of the C-130H or the T-6 trainer hovers around the 60 percent range. “I’m looking for solutions that have increased reliability,” Buckley offers. “I’d love to get to the point where every one of my platforms exhibits the same level of availability and reliability that’s exhibited by the commercial airlines.”

Meanwhile, Buckley battles an often-cited misconception that Air Force personnel perform all flight line and heavy maintenance work on the service’s assets. “That’s actually not the case,” he says. “We rely on contractor support … and I’m looking for ways to provide lower-cost contractor logistics support services.”

With several projects underway, modification is a unifying theme. One big-ticket project is the purchase and major overhaul of two presidential aircraft. The Air Force will replace the Boeing VC-25s with 747s, but that might not happen before 2023, Buckley says. The planes have “to provide every communications capability the president has sitting in his office in the White House, and that’s the tricky part,” he says.

Additionally, the command has the lead on a partnership to modify U.S. Coast Guard C-130s for use by the U.S. Forest Service to combat wildfires, he reports. “It was mandated by Congress that the Air Force do the work of putting commercial-based aerial firefighting systems in a handful of older C-130s. We’re competing [for] the work now,” Buckley says.

Officials also released this spring the requirements document for the T-X trainer aircraft family of systems set to replace the T-38 Talon. The early announcement is part of the “Bending the Cost Curve” initiative that aims to better express to industry the Air Force’s needs, help curb expenditures and encourage innovation. The service plans to award a contract in 2017 for 350 T-Xs. Until then, 150 T-38 aircraft will undergo major structural modifications to extend their service lives.

If one thing remains constant, it is change. About three years ago, Buckley’s acquisition community underwent a major reorganization to truly embrace life-cycle management—something leaders had been trying to do since the 1990s, Buckley says. Acquisition personnel see programs through from cradle to grave, giving customers a sense of consistency. “They are truly responsible for a weapons systems from the day we start working on it to the day we retire it, and it really helps us find ways to operate more efficiently,” Buckley says.