Geoff Fein
To ensure continuous operations of unmanned air vehicles (UAV) in theater, the Navy and Marine Corps have a number of procedures and contracts in place to quickly repair or replace damaged or malfunctioning systems.
When the Marine Corps trains, mans and equips unmanned aerial systems (UAS) squadrons and units, there is a process the service goes through to define the logistics for repairing those assets, defining what those procedures are going to be, and at what level maintenance is going to be done, Marine Lt. Col. Brad Beach, unmanned air systems coordinator, department of aviation, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
For example, with AAI Corp.’s [TXT] Shadow, there is a certain level of maintenance that the Marine Corps can provide, Beach said.
“Then we have a field service rep who can do another higher level of maintenance,” he added. “And then we have logistics distribution centers in theater that we can send major repairable parts and pieces to, for example the payloads and engine.”
For systems in need of major repairs, the Marine Corps sends those all the way back to the states, to the factory, if needed, Beach said.
For the Marine Corps’ Tactical UAS (TUAS), the service has a performance based logistics contract in place, Charlie Timmons, acquisition program manager for logistics, logistics lead for PMA-263, told Defense Daily. “So anything that is a major component that needs to be overhauled will be sent back under that contract.”
For the small UAS, such as AeroVironment‘s Raven B and Wasp UAS, the Marine Corps has a contractor logistics support-type contract where the Marines bring in broken aircraft and trade it one-for-one for a new air vehicle, Timmons said. “The part that is broken will be sent straight back to the factory for repair and put on the shelf again.”
There are also forward repair activities staffed with air service personnel working alongside Marine Corps supply support personnel, Timmons added.
When a UAS or a component part is brought in for repair, the system is logged in and the field service representative will do the first initial examination. “If he can repair that piece he’ll do that and put that back on the shelf. If he cannot, then he’ll send it back to the states,” Timmons said.
Turnaround time for getting a UAS repaired and back into the air depends, of course, upon the type of system, the problem, and where in theater the field repair activity is located, Timmons noted.
“We have a Joint Robotics Repair Facility for EOD systems, the T-Hawk, that is an average of 45 day turnaround–leaving from in-country to the repair facility and back into country,” he said. “That’s an average for T-Hawk. It depends on the location of the forward repair activity in relationship to the company that needs the part repaired.”
Honeywell [HON] makes the T-Hawk micro air vehicle systems used by explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) teams.
One of the things that’s important to understand is that there’s a lot of planning that goes into the entire repair and supply chain, Capt. J.R. Brown, program manager for PMA- 263, Navy and Marine Corps unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAV), told Defense Daily in the same interview.
“There are supplies in theater that help address repair time that it takes for an item to leave theater, go and be repaired, and be returned,” he said. “They have stuff on the shelf there, so that when they get a walk-in customer or it’s delivered for repair, it’s a turnaround and ‘here’s your fresh part right then and there.'”
AeroVironment has dedicated field service representatives in theater to repair any problems with its Raven B or Wasp UAS, Timmons said. “They have a forward repair activity in country. They supply a field service rep and he will do the initial work on anything that comes in.”
And EOD tech reps not only work with ground robots but will also work with T-Hawk, Timmons added. “So they are co-located with EOD.”
For the Marine Corps TUAS, Beach said the turnaround time is less than 24 hours.
“We preposition forward at one of the major repair facilities that was both Army [and Marines] because the Marine Corps TUAS is an Army program that the Marine Corps shares logistics and programmatics with,” Beach said. “We rely heavily on the Army’s repair facility and forward logistics, but they also have contractors from AAI, who manufactures the Shadow aircraft. They have contractors from AAI to ensure that we have the right parts and supplies that we need to sustain operations.”
If a Marine needs anything, it’s just a function of being able to get to that repair facility, getting those parts, and getting back to their location, Beach said.
Among the lessons being learned from the increased use of UAVs is that as the Marine Corps acquires and procures these systems, officials are looking for increased reliability and maintainability, Beach added.
“When we go to compete for a new UAS platform, that is something we are looking at very closely so that we don’t have to be replacing engines every ‘X’ amount of hours or having some kind of system failure that requires us to have a long logistics train,” he said.
Part of the main acquisition portion of this is maintenance planning, Timmons added. “We establish what the maintenance level will be, either an O level or I level (intermediate level) or depot level or combination of all of them.
“Then we look at the reliability and maintainability of the system. We base repairs on those, we base it on the number of flight hours that are going to be flown, and we also take into account the past performance of any air vehicle that may be either the same or pretty close to being the same,” Timmons said.
All of that is wrapped up into the maintainability portion of the acquisition and that’s the way the Navy and Marine Corps worked it, he added.