Date of Award

3-26-2020

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Logistics and Supply Chain Management

Department

Department of Operational Sciences

First Advisor

John M. Dickens, PhD

Abstract

By order of the Secretary of Defense, all of the US Air Force's F-16 units were tasked to improve their fleet health to a Mission Capability (MC) rate of 80 percent, as part of a Department of Defense-wide push to make its Critical Aviation Platforms, and the units that employ them, more ready and lethal. This study uses historical fleet health and sortie execution data captured from LIMS-EV (Weapon System Viewer, 2020) to create a multiple regression model that quantifies the value of increased fleet health, defined as either MC rate or Aircraft Availability (AA) rate, in terms of increasing sortie output. It also uses forecasted near-future sortie demand to assess the utility of the 80 percent MC rate standard towards achieving desired sortie execution levels. This research concludes that both AA rate and MC rate correlate with increased aircraft utilization and that an increase in either fleet health metric correlates to increased annual utilization of roughly five sorties per aircraft. It also identifies AA rate as a more significant input to sortie execution than MC rate. Furthermore, it suggests that an AA rate standard of 71 percent is most appropriate for achieving the aircraft utilization levels needed to satisfy pilot training requirements.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-ENS-MS-20-M-151

DTIC Accession Number

AD1101490

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