Hold the phones and stop the presses... the Army Research Laboratory has developed NEW aircraft maintenance technologies for the FAA.
Before we send out the thank you notes, what exactly are these cutting edge and heavily researched technologies that our taxpayer-funded researchers hath wrought?
The first one is the Health and Usage Monitoring System, or HUMS for short. This quite valuable and capable system collects data from various sensors on helicopters which aims to predict impending failures of critical components. It was developed by... wait for it... helicopter operators in the offshore oil industry. And we have had it fielded in our civilian helicopter fleet for many years.
The second and even more technically advanced system that is sure to rock the civil rotorcraft industry is called "Condition Based Maintenance" or CBM. For the less technically inclined, CBM means "replacing parts when they need to be replaced" which will eventually supercede the former Army system of "time-scheduled maintenance" or "replacing parts regardless of whether they need to be replaced".
In practice, CBM states that you will regularly inspect certain components and replace them when necessary, while time scheduled maintenance means your maintainers spend countless man hours removing components at set times regardless of the condition. Quite like changing your engine every 3,000 miles instead of changing the oil. This is known in some quarters as "wasteful", "pointless" "stupid" and "a grievous waste of time and money".
This is why civilian operators, with limited budgets and clients with limited patience, have been doing condition based maintenance for years, with strict governmental oversight.
Some in the military will argue that time scheduled maintenance has historically been necessary because of the size of Army aircraft, the stress on components, the pace of operations, blah blah and so forth. This argument works best on those who believe that the Army is the sole repository of aviation knowledge on the planet and think that an aircraft with 10,000 hours belongs on a pole in front of a museum.
I would argue that the Army pays thousands of people millions of dollars to keep hundreds of aircraft broke most of the time, and that they are idiots with unlimited funding who think they know everything. Regardless of how you might feel about this, I would bet you a paycheck that most civilian companies would be out of business by lunchtime if they managed maintenance like the Army.
I will further argue that the most outside-the-box thinkers in the Army probably brought these long standing civilian processes and systems under the Army umbrella, relabeled them with a cool sounding acronym, and then got themselves a nice OER bullet out of it.
Glad to see the greatest minds in the Army are slowly catching up, and I can't wait to see what they come up with next.
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