AI for Aircraft Readiness for the U.S. Department of Defense
The average age of the USAF aircraft fleet is 28 years. Many of these aircraft platforms, such as the E-3 Sentry, have no designated replacements and are likely to be flying continuously for the next 10 to 20 years. At the same time, fifth-generation fighter platforms, such as the F-35 Lightning II, have been beset by operational challenges rooted in the immature state of the aircraft’s complex systems.
The downtime cost for an aircraft in the USAF can be in excess of $28,000 per hour. Mission aborts, aircraft breaks, repeat/recur events, and spare part unavailability all impact aircraft mission capability and aircraft readiness.
Approach
To address these issues, the USAF implemented C3 AI Readiness, an AI-based solution to effectively predict subsystem failure, identify necessary spare parts, and proactively highlight opportunities to increase mission capability. For the initial project, C3 AI and the USAF worked to aggregate 7 to 10 years of operational data from 10 to 12 sources and then applied AI to identify when aircraft subsystems would fail.
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