F-22 GAO report on upgrades and maintenance

I would have hoped the USAF would have been further along with F-22 sustainment. I guess not. Here is the latest GAO report on that topic.

According to an Air Force analysis of F-22 maintenance issues, work related to maintaining the stealth features of the F-22 accounts for almost half of the time that the aircraft are unavailable due to maintenance.

Program officials noted that after repairs or modifications that involve removing a panel with stealth coatings, those coatings must be restored, which can take several days. As a result, minor repairs or modifications that would take a few hours on a non-stealth aircraft can require days of maintenance on an F-22.

And the following. I thought I was reading a C-5 depot report from years ago...

A contractor-run depot in Palmdale, California performing F-22 maintenance has returned multiple aircraft back to the fleet months later than planned. For example, in 2013 this depot returned one aircraft back to the fleet more than 10 months later than originally scheduled.

The metrics of fleet availability such as they are.

Cumulative spending on RAMMP projects totals about $900 million through the end of fiscal year 2013, and has had some positive effect on availability over time. However, the Air Force has never been able to meet the F-22’s aircraft availability requirement and does not expect to meet that requirement within the next 4 years. The original requirement was expressed in average hours of flying time between maintenance events for the F-22 fleet, excluding routine servicing and inspections, and was set at an average of 3.0 hours. The program was not able to meet that requirement, and it was officially changed to a requirement for overall aircraft availability, set at 70.6 percent materiel availability. This is defined as the percentage of the fleet operationally capable of performing an assigned mission at any given time. The level of availability is required to build over time, from 61.2 percent by the end of fiscal year 2011 to 70.6 percent by the end of fiscal year 2015. This requirement was established to support readiness requirements for projected training and contingency operations.

I would love to have seen a metric of maintenance actions that do and do not require stealth refurb. Years ago. LM sold the F-22 to the public as maintenance-friendly stealth and that only 5 percent of maintenance actions required stealth refurb. What is that metric today?

This GAO report is weak on telling us the kinds of structural upgrades needed. I know for a fact that F-22s get "dog-year" credits for maintenance activity if they are located in a dry environment. Also there are USAF worries about fatigue from high-G activity. That and some other issues. Would have been good to see a better mention of that in this report.

Going back to what I stated some months back. After The Cold War, the U.S. DOD noticed the need for a high-off-boresight helmet cued dogfight missile.

This arrived for the F-15,16 and F-18 years ago. The F-22 entered Initial Operating Capability in 2005 without HOBS ability. Over 10 years when this was a noted worry by DOD.

The F-22 will get this ability around 2020. About 10 years before retirement given the other issues with the aircraft.

Such huge potential wasted by poor thinking.