The CBO has a nice, short paper on aircraft availability rates in the Air Force and Navy. Check out the charts. There’s been a general decline in proportion of total aircraft available to front-line operators from roughly 60% in the year 2000 to nearly 40% for the Navy and perhaps 50% for the Air Force in 2020. The pandemic years actually saw a slight uptick in availability, but the average flying hours continued to decline.
A few years ago, the mission capable rates of combat aircraft were at a scandalous level and SecDef Jim Mattis ordered the services bring them up. It felt like the services achieved some success, with stories like this one talking about how the Navy surpassed its 80% readiness goal when before aircraft like the F/A-18s had been down in the 50% range. AFMC commander Arnold Bunch observed what should be obvious: “The really big lesson we learned is that if we put the money into the system, and we tell industry what we want to go do, we can improve the mission capable rate. “
While the services like talking about mission capable rate, the CBO was looking at aircraft availability rates. The former only looks at aircraft possessed at the unit level, while the latter looks at all aircraft inventoried. Here’s a blog post explaining the difference.
Suffice it to say, mission capable rates are higher and easier to manipulate than aircraft availability rates. When it comes to readiness, the devil’s in the detail. The CBO report provides a nice appendix on the methodologies, and an infographic at the start.
While the services said their aircraft readiness figures have rebounded and met their goals in the 2019-2020 timeframe, the CBO found that overall aircraft availability continued to decline (or a slight uptick in 2020).
The worst part is that when the services fly fewer hours per aircraft, it should be easier to maintain high availability. Unless the inventory is skyrocketing, it would seem that the services are flying fewer hours overall with the same or more money. Over the past 20 years, it looks like the services are flying roughly 30% fewer hours per aircraft.
My impression of causality is the following: sustainment costs are increasing faster than funding, causing availability rates to decline as a “pressure relief valve.” As availability rates decline flying hours are cut back. This was particularly the case in 2010-2015 timeframe during sequestration, but funding has rebounded the past 5 years much faster than availability.
In the case of the pandemic, it seems that the accelerated reduction in flying hours may have actually allowed availability rates to turn the corner a bit. That was probably helped along by the lagged effects of increased funding to boost readiness in the Mattis years. But I’m surprised the double-effect didn’t cause a greater increase to availability. Accelerating sustainment costs may be a problem that cannot be solved with higher budgets, but instead requires a paradigm shift in the industrial base.
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