Having Trouble Keeping It Up? The RAF and Typhoon availability...

According to media reporting of an FOI release about Typhoon availability, the RAF is apparently an air force unable to ‘keep it up’, as their glorious fighter pilot jocks and the boffins below prove seemingly unable to keep these aircraft in the skies. What would Lord Flasheart say?

In other words, the MOD has recently responded to an FOI request confirming that of the 156 Typhoons currently in service, at least 55 of them are in what is known as the ‘sustainment fleet’ and not available for immediate duty. This has been the cause of angry articles in the papers, suggesting that the RAF has apparently ‘failed’.

Lets stop, pause and reflect on what this news actually means. Firstly, it is important to realise that no air force anywhere in the world, at any point in history, has managed to achieve anything like 100% availability of aircraft. All of them work to a similar rhythm of maintenance regimes to ensure a constant flow of available aircraft, which can be surged in a crisis.

Airframes are very complex pieces of machinery that require regular inspection, maintenance and updates to ensure they remain fit and safe to fly properly. In peacetime this necessitates a regular rhythm of deep inspections, planned maintenance and other work to ensure that the airframe is fit and safe for use.

WW2 era Typhoon (credit Mr Paul Smith)

When the decision is taken to buy an aircraft fleet, part of the process of working out how many aircraft are needed involves scrutinising the likely maintenance requirements, projected attrition rates and life of the airframe, and setting this against the jobs that the RAF want the aircraft to carry out.

For example, the Typhoon fleet is currently required to provide a certain number of squadrons, and a certain number of aircraft to carry out ‘Quick Reaction Alert’ on an ongoing 24/7/365 basis, and provide other aircraft to be ready to carry out strike roles such as dropping bombs or launching Storm Shadow.

This in turn provides a clear guide to the RAF to work out how many airframes it needs at any one time to do this. For a purely hypothetical example, to be certain that there are always 2 x 2 QRA aircraft available, planners may require there to be 12 aircraft on a squadron to allow for minor maintenance, training flights and so on. In practical terms this means that you will always need more aircraft available than there are ready to fight immediately.

The RAF uses a concept with its aircraft of essentially having a ‘forward fleet’ of those planes ready to deploy now, or those under light maintenance but able to be deployed quickly if needed. It then has a ‘sustainment fleet’ which is essentially the part of the force which is either undergoing very long-term maintenance, or which is in storage and not actively flying. An example of the figures involved can be found from May 2018 in an answer to a Parliamentary Question about how many airframes were available at any one time.

In terms of planned maintenance, aircraft go through a range of different services, and also upgrade programmes that will take them out of action for a long period of time. A good example of this was the programme to create the Tornado GR4 project, dating back roughly 20 years, but which has kept the aircraft credible till today.Without investment in long term updates, a hugely expensive aircraft fleet quickly becomes obsolete – it may be able to fly in order to impress with numbers, but its capability quickly diminishes.

The reason to put what is a seemingly brand-new airframe in storage is about rotating the hours of the force around to ensure that you continue to keep airframes available for the long term. Jets have a finite life expectancy of flying hours (which can be extended or changed with updates), and over the long-term planners must ensure that they can continue to deliver a credible capability. For example the Typhoon was originally designed for a 6000 hour life, but even 10 years ago plans were afoot to extend this, while the F16 could, in theory, be extended out to 12000 hours

This may sound obvious, but much like a car needs a 5000 /20000 mile service, so too do jets need servicing as they hit hours flown. If you have an entire force of jets flying at the same time, all accruing roughly the same number of flying hours, then they will all require servicing at the same time, and also run out of life at the same time.  The problem if you do this is what do you rely on to get the capability continued? The US Air Force has had this exact problem, where overcommitting on operations and high pressure has left them having to draw on forces from the ‘Boneyard’ as a stopgap to make ends meet.

It is far more sensible to balance the use of the force out, ensure that the airframe hours are properly balanced, and that you can deliver a persistent capability on a long term enduring basis and not fly lots of planes for a short time, then discover the whole fleet is grounded for a long time while it waits for servicing.

A great career opportunity for people to fix and fly

So, when looking at the RAF force of 156 Typhoons, it is important to understand that you will never, ever, see 156 Typhoons flying at once. To have roughly 30% of the force in sustainment fleet is actually a really impressive achievement because it means that nearly 70% of your fighter force is available for operations.

This is a figure considerably beyond many nations ability to reach. For instance, according to the French government, in 2017 56% of their air force, including the Rafale jet, was grounded at any one time. The Royal Canadian Air Force reportedly requires 24 hours of maintenance for every hour its force of F18s fly – highlighting the heavy maintenance impact older aircraft can create.

By contrast the Royal Air Force, ably supported by UK industry, can achieve significantly greater availability rates. It is a shame that the authors of the articles chose to berate the RAF and not praise it for being so much effective and efficient than many of its peers when it comes to serviceability rates.

Four RAF Typhoon in Brunei in 2016- global reach (more info)

There will always be challenges with ensuring aircraft are available for service as required – these are as much human as mechanical. For the RAF, the challenge is to focus as much on keeping pilots, engineers and ground personnel retained in the system and able to keep the force ready for operations, as it is about simply putting planes on a flight line. Indeed, as one commentator noted on social media today, even during the Battle of Britain, the RAF had more planes than pilots, with plenty being held back in reserve for training or maintenance. 

These sorts of articles highlight the danger of just looking at statistics and assuming something is bad because a number doesn’t look good. The reality is that the RAF has put in place a world class system capable of supporting an exceptionally high level of availability for its Typhoon force, that significantly outclasses most of air forces.

Moaning that planes require deep servicing, despite their cost also misses the point too. Military hardware is advanced, it is complex, and it needs to be operated effectively and safely at all times. Flight safety is paramount here and cutting corners just to get another aircraft available in peacetime to improve a statistic is a foolish behaviour to adopt. For those interested in the enormous complexity of defence aviation safety, a glance at the archive of ‘Air Clues’ (an official RAF publication) gives an insight into this hugely complex issue.

In wartime there is always the potential to stretch the margin slightly or take a bit more risk on servicing. If the need is there, then it is astounding what can be done when difficult times demand risk to be taken. But in normal peacetime operations, it makes little sense to risk safety, and burn up airframe fatigue life without really good reason.

The wider picture is that this once again proves the vital importance of logistics and resilience in Defence. A lot of military commentators fixate merely on headline numbers as an assessment of overall capability (e.g. Country X has 48 of these jets, Country Y only has 20 – Country Z therefore ‘wins). In reality things are much more complex than this and it is about the ability to deliver the jobs you want your armed forces to do on a persistent basis, not just a headline capability.

In terms of how normal this is, every single major procurement programme, for every single country going, for tanks, artillery, ships, jets and complex weapons is built around the model of in service equipment and equipment being offline for maintenance. No one buys any military equipment with the expectation of there being 100% uptime.

The RAF has almost unparalleled global reach and capability

These sorts of reports are frustrating as they represent an extremely basic level of reporting without any analysis as to what is going on. In a time when people constantly bemoan the level of defence understanding in the public, is it any wonder that people think “we don’t have a military anymore” when these sorts of reports come out?

It is at times very easy to have an enormous amount of sympathy with the team in the MOD and Single Service press offices, who are trying to provide factual and correct information to the press in response to stories they have developed through FOI fishing enquiries. It is not particularly difficult to explain that the RAF, like every other Air Force on the planet, must service its aircraft to ensure they are safe, and that you can’t fly all the planes all the time.

Yet the unerring ability in some journalistic quarters to turn this into a self-proclaimed ‘scandal’ and associated ‘bad news’ story (like this quasi-hysterical piece entitled ‘RIP RAF’)  is just depressing. Its hard at times not to feel frustrated at a publishing attitude in some areas which is best entitled “who wants to read objective balanced reporting on UK Defence issues as all our readers just want to do is moan about how bloody awful everything is and how we don’t have an armed forces anymore”.

These stories aren’t even particularly new or innovative – there is no Watergate papers level of daring do and rock solid investigatory journalism here. For years now people have been submitting FOI’s about aircraft availability and then publishing pretty much the same story, with the numbers and dates changed – for example here is pretty much the same story from 2017, the same story from 2015 etc. The story hasn’t changed, the underpinning issues haven’t changed, its just groundhog day reportage without analysis. 

What is missing here is a strategic outlook. The Typhoon is an exceptional aircraft that will be at the forefront of the UK’s defences for decades to come. The sensible management of the fleet now is vital to ensure it is available in the same numbers and to meet whatever missions are called of it in 10,15,20 years’ time as it is today. If that means keeping aircraft in the sustainment fleet, then so be it. It is far better to take a 20-year perspective, than to give into tabloid pressure and take the perspective of becoming a ’20 minuter’…

'Sir Humphrey' can be reached via pinstripedline@gmail.com