Depot

About every 7 years or so, a USAF F-15 goes back to Robins AFB, Georgia to get refurbished. It was designed this way, as opposed to an F-16 or F-18 which were originally designed to fly x-amount of hours and then thrown in the trash.

Q: The on-time delivery rate for aircraft has fluctuated widely in recent years? Where is it now?

A: It is improving. You may not recognize it if you pay attention to just due date performance. For example, the (F-15 area) would look like every F-15 we produce is late. That is because we had 26 more than we were supposed to have, so they are queued up and they are accumulating what we call "queue time" or "wait time" before they get into the production machine. As they go through the production machine -- although we are given 145 days -- with actual touch time on an aircraft, we have done jets in 108 days. It still looks like because of all the queue time that it took 210 days, as an example, to do that jet. Put it another way, F-15s right now, with what management has done to work on the processes and the production machine, have gained a 60 percent increase in their speed. And C-130s have about a 35 percent increase in their (speed).

Unfortunate. Less than 10 years ago, it was about 88 flow-days to process an F-15.


Touch labor! One of the places I would visit often,
the F-15 wing shop where after they are removed from
the aircraft, they get a full refurbishment.
(USAF photo)

The C-17?

Q: What are C-130 and C-17 production rates?

A: The C-17 averages about 45 percent, which is an improvement. But what you have to understand about C-17 is even that number is not telling. C-17 is a nose-to-tail activity and when a jet arrives you have a particular work package you are to do on it, but as it is coming in, our partner Boeing and the warfighter have additional things they would like you to do to that aircraft. So there's a certain amount of work that you know you are going to do, programmed planned to do, and then there's added work that comes in with that jet.

Like the F-16 and F-18, the C-17 was pitch to DOD as: "Look, it won't need depot refurbs!".

Sold.

Guess what happened years later as the C-17 flew into the real world? It is now a "depot jet" by any other name; like the F-16 or F-18.

Unlike the F-15, those aircraft were never designed with depot rework built in to address aircraft ageing and wear.

An after-thought.




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