Maintaining Focus

This article reviews that designers and managers are taking aircraft maintainability more seriously than ever. For the first time, the concerns of the maintainers are being addressed early in the design phase, before any hardware is produced. Maintainability is one of the key criteria by which the US Department of Defense will award the initial production contract. Given the new emphasis on maintenance, engineers are investing extra effort to predict that key tasks can be done efficiently. Lockheed Martin has been able to back-fit to the F-16 and F-22 programs some of what it learned from the JSF simulations and animations. Both those planes were designed before maintainability became such a target. Simulations are regularly shared with key partners, such as those involved in JSF propulsion. The first JSF simulation took nine months—a combination of learning curve and time needed to model thousands of postures and movements by four human models.