Setting The Requirements For The Royal Air Forces Next Generation Aircraft

Christopher J Hockley David P Appleton

Headquarters Logistics Command, Royal Air Force

UK

Headquarters Logistic Command, Royal Air Force

UK

Key Words: Requirement, Failure Free Life, Fault Tolerant System, Maintenance Free Operating Periods, Reliability Degradation.

SUMMARY & CONCL USIONS Despite the fact that it is extremely early even in the definition of reliability and maintainability targets for the RAFs Future Offensive AircraH (FOA), the support vision is looking for an aircraft which will have guaranteed periods of availability by staying serviceable, requires only a few maintenance personnel, needs little in the way of specialized support and Aircraft Ground Equipment (AGE), and is thus ready and capable to be deployed and operated anywhere in the world. Traditional reliability and maintainability requirements which allow a specific number of faults and failures are, therefore, considered inadequate for these needs and so a Maintenance Free Operating Period (MFOP) concept has been selected, in principle, as the prime reliability and maintainability requirement. By specifling reliability and maintainability in this way it is the intention to drive the design from the bottom up rather than accepting the old top down approach which allocates a number of faults to each system and sub-system. A better understanding of all failure mechanisms will be required as will a more thorough understanding of the environment and usage; the approach will also demand better specification and description of such parameters by the customer. Industry and the customer will therefore have to work together to achieve these new demanding requirements and tackle the considerable technical challenges in partnership from day one of the programme.

1.

INTRODUCTION

Mission effectiveness at an affordable price has to be the key for future Royal Air Force (RAF) military projects (REF: 1). Hence, mission reliability for any future aircraft will be at the forefront of our Staff Requirements2 alongside the requirement to optimize support costs to meet the stated performance. The RAF has drastically reduced in size since the end of the Cold War and is probably going to be even smaller by the time we receive into service the next generation of combat aircraft, which will not be until the next millennium. The RAF will not only be smaller in terms of the number of service personnel (which will also mean substantial cuts in the number of maintenance personnel) but it is likely that there will be considerably less money available to the RAF to spend on procuring and maintaining essential equipment. The changing role of the RAF will mean that these financial constraints will have a direct influence on our ability to deploy as a fighting unit to one or more areas of operation. Therefore, to remain operationally effective at an affordable price we cannot continue accepting the huge logistic tail of spares, manpower and recovery facilities which bedevils the modern combat aircraft and has a direct drain on scarce national resources.

The ability of the aircraft or system to complete its designated

mission

A StaffRequirement for the UK describes the function and performance required of the proposed new weapon or equipment and the environment in which it is to operate.

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Furthermore, tomorrow's aircraft are not only coming under the acceptance that equipment will failure randomly means increasing pressure from shrinking defence budgets, to there is little incentive to understand when and why failures reduce spiraling cost, but an unnoticed corollary will be the will occur. Once an equipment has its reliability allocation3 , lack of spare-fat (reserve capability) available for hture then it seems all activities concentrate on augmenting this operations. Traditionally, the military have relied upon this belief in random failure using predictions and any other spare-fat in areas such as personnel and spares holdings to available statistical tools without addressing the engineering meet any unplanned commitments or a general 'surge'. aspects of reliability; yet some industries aim to eradicate However, this is a luxury we can no longer afford and all random failures from the outset, for instance the nuclear potential commitments must be accounted for now. industry, the space industry and the passenger travel industry including air, rail and sea. The acceptance of random failures As Defence budgets are cut and as equipment generally does not allow the most effective use of the limited resources becomes more complex and hence more expensive, then the available in the prosecution of Air Power and will be an ever cost of running the RAF (if only proportionally) is going to increasing impediment on our operations in the future. On rise. The increased costs will be associated with: the other hand, the eradication of random failures and, consequently, corrective maintenance, would drastically 0 redress the situation. Higher acquisition cost of new equipment. Ever increasing running costs.
0 The anticipated need for increased skill levels which will mean manpower costs will not automatically go down, despite the total number of personnel decreasing.

The role of the RAF is moving towards being more flexible with an emphasis on greater deployability; the challenge to the engineer is to achieve this with fewer resources and less infrastructure. Consequently, we must seek out value-formoney when procuring new equipment and this means procuring equipment with substantially better Reliability and I Maintainability (R&M) in order to meet these more stringent operational requirements at an affordable price.

Figure 1: Failures Per 1000 Flying Hrs Figure 1: of failures per lO0Oflying hrs, illustrates the traditional way of halving the reliability requirement for successive generation of aircraft, but world class companies The traditional approach to reliability within the RAF has don't acce$ this approach and see the total elimination of been to state either directly, or as the reciprocal, the faults and failures as their only way to survive and to minimum acceptable Mean Time Between FailuresRaults increase their market share. It is these companies that we (MTBF) as our reliability requirement. This traditional should be using as our benchmark and not the last generation method is then interpretated as meaning that random failures of aircraft. or faults (with respect to time) are inevitable: 2.2 Alternative Approaches 'Currently during the development of an aircraft, or for that matter any piece of equipment, considerable Several approaches were considered which might produce effort is wasted in the statistical accounting of levels of reliability that were more certain and not subject to reliability with measures such as MTBF. By giving the randomness of using a top down allocation of faults and the contractor a top level reliability statement (such as MTBFs based on previous equipments. Believing that a failure rate in number of failures per 1000 hrs for a operational availability was the key parameter to the effective given system) the practice of allocation from a top down approach is reinforced (REF: : ) 2 2.1
The Traditional Approach
2.

R&M REQUIREMENTS

These approaches have thus given us an inbred culture of the inevitability and acceptability of failures and it seems that

The allocation of reliability requirements from a top-down

approach.

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use of expensive assets, the first principle established was that achieving periods offailure free and fault free operation were essential. Yet it is necessary to understand the difference between the two, particularly in the light of new technologies which will be available in the next 20 years such as modular avionics, re-confgurability and neural networks. Failure free means that the equipment is able to operate to its full mission requirement for the period required or specified. There may well be faults, however, that do not affect the operation of the equipment or system; perhaps by re-configuration or redundancy, operation is unafTected and thereby no failure is recorded. Fault free on the other hand means, fairly obviously, that there are no faults and the system is also able to operate to its full mission requirement for the period required or specified. There are no faults or failure of the system simple and unequivocal.

0 Failure Free Operating Period (FFOP): Defined as a number of days or hours when the overall system is running continuously without failure (REF: 4)4.

0 Fault Free Period of Operation (FFPOO): Defined as a period during which the system is available but not necessarily in an operating mode. Useful as a figure for a detachment for example.

0 Maintenance Free Operating Period (MFOP): Defined as a period of continuous operation without the need for logistic support.

0 The Maintenance Recovery Period (MRP): Related to MFOPs and is defined as the downtime during which appropriate maintenance might be done to recover the system to its fully serviceable state.

Another approach is to specify the requirements in terms of operational availability. Experience in the past has shown that there have been difficulties both in interpretation and therefore in the ability to contract for availability in any meaningful way. Any discussion also quickly becomes subjective as to levels of operational although minimum equipment lists and Go/NoGo lists can be used; furthermore, availability is difficult to define. For example a failure in a missile pylon after successful launch of the missile could be ignored as the pylon could be changed within the allowable turnround time. Operational availability, however, has been selected by the F-22 project which is concentrating on availability and operational effectiveness with their concept of Essential System Repair Time (ESRT). The F-22 key parameter is the sortie generation rate together with mission reliability. ESRT evaluates the reliability and the repair time necessary to ensure a given sortie rate (REF: 3).

3.2

The Way Forward

As resources become scarce and there is constant push for Life Cycle Cost (LCC) savings there is a requirement for the next generation of combat aircraft to be able to fly multiple sorties back to back with little if any logistic support and no apparent reduction in lethality. Despite the fact that it is extremely early days for the Future Offensive Aircraft (FOA)~, it has been concluded that traditional R&M requirements will not adequately define our future needs and represents an operational (reliability) requirement for the whole aircraft.
3.3

Maintenance Free Operating Period

A MFOP is defined for the whole aircraft as a period of operation during which the aircraft should be able to carry out all its assigned missions, without the operator being restricted in any way due to system faults or limitations with the minimum of maintenance, (i.e during the MFOP the aircraft will be Failure Free). The MFOP should allow operational staff to task assets without fear of failing to meet the operational commitment and, hence, the MFOP will need to be virtually guaranteed! (REF: 5)

3.

ACHIEVING OUR ASPIRATIONS

3.1

Defining Our Aims

There are numerous different ways of describing where we (the UK) really want to get to and we must be careful that the introduction of new terminology does not lead to further confusion and undermine our objective; provided a comprehensive definition is agreed then perhaps there will be no confusion. Any definition must be defined in a way that is meaningful, realistic and achievable. and reflect what we want from our next generation of aircraft. Typical new terminology being used in the setting of R&M requirements in the RAF includes:

The difference behveen,faults and failures continually provides confusion and it is essential that each are definedfor every project to ensure there is no confilsion
5

The Future Offensive Aircraft is planned to provide the RAF n ith an offensive air capability, replacing the Tornado GR4 in theyear 2015.

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SYSTEM
A

MFOPs

Figure 2: System MFOPs

MFOP. There must also not be any pre-conceived solution to the maintenance philosophy which will be developed by the ILS strategy which aims to find the most cost-effective maintenance solution tosneet the operational requirement (in this case the operational requirement is the stated MFOP). Generally, however, we are aiming for all maintenance to be on a planned basis and that will mean the designer having a much greater understanding of how and when items will fail. The ability to know when your aircraft will need particular levels of maintenance will greatly enhance the operational availability of that aircraft; maintenance downtime would then be programmed around the operational commitment of the squadron and spares could be demanded just-in-time for the required maintenance action. To realize this objective will, however, require a significant culture change amongst many of the key defence contractors.
3.5
Achieving a MFOP

During the MFOP the necessity for maintenance should be, by design, kept to a minimum. An agreed definition of what is meant by the statement minimum maintenance is essential but at this stage we expect that the only maintenance activities to be carried out during a MFOP would be those typically assigned and allowable during flight servicing. As operators of aircraft then the key parameter of interest is the aircraft or platform MFOP which will be a result of combined individual system MFOPs as illustrated, at Figure 2:, the greater the aircraft MFOP the longer the operators can task and fly the aircraft. In this example system C will drive the aircraft MFOP simply because system C is the weak link. Trade-offs will be necessary between system MFOPs during design and development to optimize the aircraft MFOP. In our example, at Figure 2:, it may not be desirable to accept System C as the driver of the current MFOP for operational reasons and a MFOP equivalent to system B would be preferred. The trade-off would be enhanced operational performance against additional development work on system C to improve its reliability to the level of system B.
3.4
Maintenance Recovery Period

Fundamental to achieving a MFOP will be adopting a bottom-up approach to reliability whereby there is an understanding of why items fail and, of course, an ability to be able to predict when they will fail in-service. Once designers are in a position of understanding the failure mechanisms they can apply different techniques to the various failure mechanisms to achieve an MFOP. Depending on how equipment fails will dictate how a solution is engineered to deliver a MFOP:
e

Condition Monitoring. Useful Life. Fault Tolerance. Acceptable Degradation. New Technology.

The bottom-up approach to reliability can only be implemented if reliability is addressed from day one of the programme. All associated Technical Demonstration Obviously the aircraft will need to be maintained at some Programmes (TDP) and a programme of work during a feasibility phase, together with any Technical Demonstration point and this will be during the MEP. Aircraft (TDA), should not only prove the concept works After each designated MFOP there will be a MRP technically, but additionally should be used to reduce the risk which will include all maintenance actions necessary from poor reliability. Gathering relevant environmental data, to recover the aircraft to its serviceable state. The e.g. aircraft localized vibration, temperature and humidity length and intensity of the MRP will be directly data, as well as indicative failure characteristics at the related to the length of each systems MFOP earliest stage in the development programme, will offer (REF:5). designers much better opportunities to design for reliability. Having an early indication of design weaknesses will also Within the MRP there will be differing maintenance policies allow precious resources to be focused at the right for differing systems and equipments, but at this stage there development areas to maximize the return on investment. should not be any pre-conceived solutions, Rather these will be driven by the Design Authority, who may need to make trade-off decisions about improving reliability of one part of the design to achieve a more practical system or overall
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smooth progression through various development stages with many concurrent activities. There will be a requirement to Clearly there are risks and potential costs in achieving these clearly define maturity gates for systems; however, these aspirations. The concept may well increase the frequency of gates need not be aligned in time. inspection for some items, or it may increase the refbrbishment requirements for some parts, or it might well involve the scrapping of items before the end of their previously used life 4. CONTRACTORS RESPONSE cycles. Each component, LRU and system will need to be analyzed during its design to establish what guaranteed MFOP it can be given and at what cost if it needs to be improved. For Overall UK Industry, of all sizes, have acknowledged the some there may not need to be any great change, but for others it concept of MFOP as a positive (large) step in the right will identtfy if the design must be changed or whether direction for future combat aircraft. The response varies from inspection, refurbishment or scrapping is Cost-effective. So far it contractor to contractor with, surprisingly, the smaller has proved Micult to model and establish whether savings in contractors finding it easier to conceive the change. Industry manpower, both in reduced effort and in much more efficient use realizes that a change in culture is necessary, if they are to of that manpower, will outweigh any increased costs caused by stay competitive, but they do have genuine concerns on how more f q u e n t removals, refurbishment, or possibly not using all to effectively carry through the necessary changes. Firstly, of the available life of every item. being able to contract for MFOPs whilst not accepting a disproportionate risk on themselves is of concern to There is also the problem of aggregation of a great number of industry. The problem is not insurmountable, but industry individual LRUs, sub-systems and system MFOPs into an overall currently feel confident in assessing any risk associated with aircraft or equipment MFOP which needs a certain faith and an contracting for MTBF having used the system for many optimistic approach. Integration and build reliability by the years. Secondly, military development contracts are often Prime contactor will require great attention to detail and measured in decades rather than years and such long improvements in processes, if the benefits are not to be negated timescales are seen as a severe handicap for all concerned. at the final manufacturing stage. A real partnership between The ability to get the product to the market place as soon as sub-contractors, suppliers, prime contractors and customers will possible would offer one solution to the win-win scenario be required. It is with integration and motivation that the risks needed to motivate industry to drive through the required of achievement lie, yet the rewards could be great both for cultural changes. Industry are already benchmarking their producers and customers alike. development activities against programmes such as the Boeing 777 and the support of the customer is vital to 3.1 Changing the Culture implementing this change. Finally, a partnership between the customer and industry is believed to be vital, but there must The evident prerequisite to delivering an aircraft capable of be transparency and mutual trust throughout the design flying multiple sorties back to back is a major culture change process by all involved to give confidence that the best within the defence industry and one which can only be solution is being sought. This is a concept which will require brought about by a close working relationship between the nurturing and time to mature if it is going to work to the customer and the contractor. The contractor must clearly advantage of both parties. understand our requirements and we must trust the contractor to deliver that requirement.
3.6

The Rish and Costs

Through the development phase there must be a willingness to embrace and adapt new processes and technologies which would provide clear reliability advantages. Traditional thinking will not deliver our aspirations and a serious effort to change the culture will be needed. This can only be achieved if there is a desire to accept change at the highest levels of both customer and contractor.
3.8

Contracting f o r MFOP

It is essential that we derive a sufficiently flexible and adaptive contracting environment which encourages success rather penalizes failure and fosters a win-n in scenario for both the customer and industry. The concept of concurrent engineering must be contracted for in such a nay that n e move an ay from the current procurement cycle. with clearly defined end points between phases, to one n hich will allow a

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1997 PROCEEDINGS Annual RELlABILlTY and MAINTAINABILITY Symposium