Adapting Commercial Best Practices to U.S. Air Force Maintenance Scheduling

Abstract

This paper presents how the Inspection Development Framework’s (IDF) novel maintenance scheduling technique increased aircraft utilization and availability in a sample of the United States Air Force’s (USAF) C-5M Super Galaxy fleet. The hypothesis tested was “Can we execute segmented maintenance requirements during ground time opportunities in order to optimize flying?” We applied IDF to decompose the C-5M’s five‑day Home Station Check (HSC) inspection into smaller work packages that subordinate to operational requirements and maintenance resource availability. Ten HSCs at Dover and Travis Air Force Base (AFB) were modified using IDF and measured against a control group of traditional HSCs. While statistical significance was not achieved given the small sample size, anecdotal results demonstrate improvements in maintenance downtime, sortie count, and flight hours for the experimental group across the two bases. Specifically, the pathfinder’s observed results extrapolated to all HSCs at each base projected an additional 15 flying days per year at Dover AFB and 29 sorties per year at Travis AFB. These C‑5M improvements serve as a proof-of-concept for the USAF adapting commercial best practices to address declining aircraft readiness. IDF’s more agile and dynamic scheduling techniques also enable easier adoption of Condition Based Maintenance through a more integrated approach to optimally schedule maintenance requirements.

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