Issue 19, January 2012
FOCUS GOVERNMENT
inherent problem in that component?” And once the aircraft is landed, it can also project how long it will be out of action.
CHANGING LOGISTICS PHILOSOPHY
For years, the military wanted 100% of its assets up 100% of the time, Hammond recalls. That was the mantra of the leaders, who said, “You will do this,” to which their staff replied, “Roger that. We’ll do that.” Hammond says that cost the military a lot of money. “We have 10 airplanes sitting on a flight line and you got a flight schedule that only requires four, but when you’re working to fix those other four that are down, you’re spending money you don’t really need to spend.”
So a team, which included Hammond, created an initiative that would optimize the process, and in order to change the goal from having all the assets up all the time, to having the right assets with the right configuration in the right place at the right time.
“I don’t need all 10 airplanes,” he says. “Why am I working to fix all 10 airplanes? Everybody always wants the airplanes fixed, but I don’t have the money. I’ve got airplanes forward-deployed funnelled to them.”
that need that money
One of Deckplate’s recent achievements was helping a team managing several thousand F18 aircraft upgrade its engine- tracking system. Lisa Clark of Spalding says the F18 program office asked Spalding to help it with parts tracking for engines as they migrated from a legacy system to a new optimized system. “They were going to be losing visibility of engine
life tracking and usage for 2,000 engines,” Clark says.
The 1,200 F18 aircraft make up about 40% of the Navy’s fleet, she says. Several squadrons provide support for these machines and these squadrons were planning to take about two years to migrate the legacy maintenance environment to the optimized one.
“And during that time it’s possible for engines to flow between a legacy squadron and an optimized squadron, and we found out… that they lose visibility into the ‘lifing’ of that engine, so they have to go from this conservative lifing for the engine and costing taxpayers a lot of money because they lose that visibility.”
Lifing is an estimate of the length of the engine’s useful life. This is where the Deckplate team came in. They integrated data between the legacy and the optimized systems, providing access to the full picture of the F18 fleet’s engines.
BIGGER DATA ON HORIZON
Spalding’s currently on-going Deckplate project is something called ‘binning’. “This is where we’re really getting into big data,” Clark says. Rather than looking at what’s happening with the aircraft monthly, the binning project is to look at a history of some 200m maintenance actions, and breaking them down into the exact types of maintenance actions that took place.
“Every 15 minutes of this maintenance action – what would we attribute that 15 minutes to? Were we awaiting maintenance? Were we awaiting supply? How do we get to that fine-
grained data to really understand where the bottlenecks are?” Clark explains.
This presents a big problem from an IT perspective, since the amount of data the team is going to be dealing with is going to balloon. They’re starting by looking at the last five years, within which about 5,000 aircraft had some kind of status change.
“We’re looking at all the status messages related to this aircraft – all the maintenance stats associated with this aircraft and the usage,” Clark says. This data is combined and analysed to arrive at the ultimate set of results, which is identifying what exactly time was spent on when the aircraft was in the maintenance status.
To do this, the team is looking at increasing Deckplate’s processing capacity by almost 600%. The timing could not be better because the Teradata systems are due for a refresh. There are currently three Teradata environments, using the company’s massively parallel
platform: test, development and
production. The environments are running on 15 servers, some of which are virtualized.
During the tech refresh, the test system is going to be replaced with a new one, and processing power of the production system is going to be boosted significantly. The Teradata systems are also going to change from Windows operating system to Linux.
A GRADUAL MIGRATION
To stay current, the Deckplate team has a five- year program to incrementally replace NavAir’s legacy systems. Taking the most useful functions of the applications on those systems, improving them and migrating them onto Deckplate.
Systems being migrated include a system that reports where any aircraft is and its status at any given time. The logistics management system is another one being migrated. Deckplate will make it from a static system into a dynamic one. These are only a couple of examples.
As legacy applications more are improved and
migrated onto the new platform, NavAir becomes
and more F-18C Hornet aircraft taking off from Navy aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. Image courtesy of the US Navy. effective in
supporting the Navy’s missions, ensuring its staff around the world have the data they need to do their jobs.
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