Of Helicopter Maintenance Hours...

...and War at home.

Economics is often referred to as “the dismal science,” but in my opinion it has an even darker cousin, known as Logistics in military circles.

Logistics is the “overall process of managing how resources are acquired, stored, and transported to their final destination. Logistics management involves identifying prospective distributors and suppliers and determining their effectiveness and accessibility. Logistics managers are referred to as logisticians.”¹

In military parlance, we call this “getting people and all their associated kit and shit - beans, bullets, bandaids, you name it” where it needs to be, and (critically) when it needs to be there… Without excuses. I wasn’t a logistician, but every unit has one; at the small unit level, you might call them “foragers”, “traders”, and a lot of other names, but there are always guys (and gals) who know how to find stuff you need - that’s what the Military Supply system is supposed to furnish to the logistician.

Logistics systems includes the supply chains for movement of goods to manufacture, subsequent shipping and tracking of finished goods, sale, and their availability. Alexander the Great supposedly said, “My logisticians are a humorless lot … they know if my campaign fails, they are the first ones I will slay.” Every Log-O I ever knew would point to that General Omar Bradley attribution that “amateurs talk tactics; professionals talk logistics.”

Yeah, it’s okay, Broski, not everyone gets infantry. We still love ya. Just make sure we don’t run out of shit paper.

The Dismal Science, and Nonsense, of Military Aviation Logistics

Among one of the more challenging, and rewarding, jobs I had in aviation was being a maintenance “tester” - a post-maintenance functional check pilot, or “FCP” for short. To be clear, this is not the same thing as a no-shit NAS Pax River or Air Force Test Pilot School, “the Right Stuff" experimental test pilot. Not by a longshot. FCPs are local squadron pilots who usually self-identify as nerds about their aircraft, go through a syllabus of flights under the instruction of a senior “tester,” spend a shit-ton of time reading the maintenance instruction manuals (MIMs), then take some tests and a final check ride. The CO signs off on it and then, “poof”, you’re now qualified to be a guinea pig and make sure that aircraft actually fly and are safe after the mechanics are done turning wrenches on them. Your signature on the line is certifying that the aircraft is safe for flight for other pilots to take out on operational flights.

Among the endless things you learn about when you start hanging around with mechs and maintenance pilots is how many man-hours it takes per each flight hour of aircraft time. The UH-1 and AH-1 both have some of the lower numbers among military helicopters because of the airframes’ relative simplicity (relative, it is a *helicopter* after all, a collection of mostly-related parts flying in loose formation). I think the numbers were the high-6s (say 6.8 hours) for the Huey and low-7s (7.3 maybe?) for the Snake, but for ease of math and understanding, let’s just agree that it requires 8 hours of wrench-turning per hour of flight.²

That’s 8 hr. Maint/1 Fh or, said differently, you need one guy turning a wrench his entire workday - a full shift - for one hour of flight time. Some Additional and Important helicopter & military aviation context:

1. Helicopters never go out for just a single, one-hour flight. Typically, the UH and AH have enough internal fuel for a 2-hour flight… So that means we really need double the man-hours for a “sortie” - two full 8-hour shifts, for a single flight in our case;

2. Military training rarely consists of single-ship work - i.e. Cobras and Hueys, in most training - the kind that matters - and always in combat, travel in pairs. That means we really need to double our maintenance man-hour needs (again), so now we’re up to 32 man-hours for a single, two-ship training sortie of two hours for two aircraft.

3. Typically, a squadron runs two maintenance sections, 8 hours each (allegedly) - a Day Crew (“Day Crew, Stay Crew!”) and a Night Crew. This means that it takes two full days of maintenance in man-hours (2 x 16) to get a section of helicopters airborne for a single flight. In reality it means you have two guys who work on two helicopters all day, then they punch the clock and their replacements come in and work second shift to finish that up, and then the next day - if everything goes perfectly - you test them in the morning and by the afternoon you’ve got two helicopters ready for a single night training mission.

All of the above has one giant underlying logistical assumption built into it; something that is a complete fiction. The above example assumes that you’ve got all of the parts you need for the requisite maintenance just… sitting around in a magical horn of plenty on non-existent shelf-space from which you can pull it and then go right outside and le voilà! Par example,

• Oh, one of your pilots burned up a starter-generator? Why, here’s a brand new one, just what we needed right at this very moment! Or,

• A piece of the avionics suite just got cooked from a power surge during a cart-start? No problem! Just happen to have one handy! Or,

• …A tail rotor got bent while the aircraft was being towed? WHO THE FUCK WAS IN CHARGE OF DETAIL?!? Oh, and yes, easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy, we’ll just order a spare tail rotor blade off of Amazon with rush delivery!

You beginning to see the potential problems yet? (N.B. Anyone who has ever had maintenance done on their car probably has some small sense of this - multiply it by a factor of about 100 for a squadron of helicopters).³

Having the right part at exactly the moment at which some unknown future failure occurs is impossible. Now, one could foresee a future in which a squadron commander (for example) has enough data from a squadron’s ongoing maintenance operations to look back and observe that in an average 6 months you’ve had to order X number of starters, and Y number of radios, and have bent Z number of blades, or tail-rotor drive shafts, etc., and then, like Amazon does, have those particular high-need items stored in a warehouse nearby for a squadron to “call on” regularly. In fact, that system is exactly what’s in place - in the Marine Corps, it’s called “Group level” maintenance, where an additional (non-flying) Maintenance and Logistics Squadron within a Marine Aircraft Group - a collection of squadrons - exists specifically to fulfill this need, like a military helicopter squadron’s very own AutoZone or O’Reilly’s Auto Parts. While helpful, the above is a “70% solution” and doesn’t help when items run out, or you’ve got unusual breaks of flight-critical parts.

How It Works in Reality

The military’s version of a prison-yard solution goes something like this: aircraft that fly tend to continue to fly. Aircraft that don’t, Don’t. So, you wind up with a few aircraft known as “hangar queens” that get cannibalized (“canned”) for those unusual breaks and parts you can’t get, but are a must need for the aircraft that do fly and we’ve got pilots to train and missions to support and the Commanding General wants a bird Wednesday to take him for a site visit, blah blah blah… world without end, Amen.

This is, to me, an expected fix for a largely insoluble problem, but it comes with its own set of challenges. First, your maintenance times go up because if you’re “canning” aircraft, you’ve got to take the part you need off of an aircraft where it’s already installed, and that sometimes is easier than it sounds. Depending upon what broke and where it’s located, it might be easier to wait for a part to come in than try to spend 7 hours removing a hydraulic servo (for example), so you can spend another 7 removing the broken one on the good aircraft, and then another 5 putting it in. (Again, imagine this with your car in a stack of similar cars). Second, the “system” - in the form of someone higher up the Chain of Command - doesn’t like ANY of its multimillion dollar aircraft sitting in the hangar being used for spare parts, so there are reporting requirements for aircraft that haven’t flown for more than a certain number of days. I don’t remember exactly, but there’s like a 60-day bad-boy notice, and then maybe a 75, and a 90-day “Oh shit, we’re in trouble!” deadline.

All of which creates a kind of musical chairs for aircraft that the Maintenance shop is constantly fighting in order to avoid having an aircraft be reportable for being the hangar queen/parts shop for the rest of the squadron.⁴

…And Now for Some Big Picture, Big Boy Talk

All of the above is really just the setup for the punchline, which is coming shortly (promise).⁵ First, I note that a reasonably experienced grunt (i.e. an infantryman), or an artillery battery platoon commander, or a Motor T wrench-turner, or a submariner, could ALL tell a similar tale of woe from their specialties. Second, I want to “back out” a bit and trade focus on the tail end of the logistics train for scope on how this all relates to making war.

In my exposition above, there was another set of implicit assumptions I left out: that all of this maintenance and training and flying is happening here, in the United States, during peacetime. Try to imagine how much more difficult the jigsaw puzzle I’ve tried to word-illustrate gets when you’re on a ship at sea as part of an Amphibious Ready Group,⁶ itself a part of a larger Carrier Battle Group or, even more pointedly for this essay - when you’re in a foreign land with hostile forces trying to sabotage, interfere with, slow, or otherwise prevent one from accomplishing this logistical ballet.

Yeahhh, buddy, now we’re talking about the real McGonagle!

I want you to try to imagine how difficult it can be when a populace doesn’t just ignore what you’re doing, but they are actively trying to inhibit it. From something as minor as local traffic congestion or shitty/nonexistent roads to the fact that maintenance has to be done behind walls guarded by men with guns, to being rocketed, or having convoys with parts resupply attacked regularly, or planes with supplies shot at with surface to air missiles while trying to land, and on and on.

This is where I wanted to get your head in order to discuss what really matters to me: our current situation here in the Peaceful People’s Democracy of United States. Maybe you heard it, or maybe you missed it, but our current Nursing Home Resident in Chief, and other younger members of Team Do What We Say Or Else, always seem to mention the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. military in discussions about Second Amendment restrictions.

Here, for example, from June 21, 2023 (Biden F-16 quote). Or here, from Aug. 30, 2022 (F-15 quote). Or here (Rep. Swalwell’s Nov. 2018 comment about the USG using nuclear weapons on its own people). There are certainly more, but you’ll notice that in all three of these comments, elected officials are trying to tell the American people that armed resistance to the U.S. government is futile because of all of the OMG(!)-super-duper, weapons-of-war the U.S. military possesses that you don’t - with your piddly AR-15 or shotgun.

And yet…

…the U.S. military got run out of Afghanistan with its tails between its legs fighting tribesmen with nothing more than small arms and RPGs (largely).

Why is that? Military talking heads on television will point to a list of factors in their 15 second sound-bytes, but none of them will talk about the essential, logistical truth that armies on hostile soil have had to contend with from Alexander, Hannibal, and Genghiz Khan down through the Brits in the U.S. (with France also at their throats), Hitler’s Wehrmacht, Westmoreland in Vietnam, and the current yes-men, Milley and Austin: all of those Armies had to live behind walls because they are not of the people.

When Joe Biden or Eric Swalwell get fired up talking about using U.S. airpower on Trump’s Ultra-MAGA Deplorables, do you think they have a clue about how those F-16s and F-15s are going to be supplied and maintained so they can go bomb other Americans? And the people who turn the wrenches - and spend the night crew working on those planes - are they just going to live out in the community, put their head on the pillow at night, and expect that their neighbors will just ignore that they’re the ones keeping those aircraft in the sky? You want to get real-real: where are their kids going to go to school when bombs start falling?

Do you see what I mean now? Big Boy Talk; Real Talk about Civil War. It won’t take bombs or other aircraft to keep those planes out of the sky. And I haven’t even addressed things like the availability of drones, of booby-traps and IEDs, of what happens when truckers go on strike and won’t move goods, of spiked rails, and on and on and on.⁷

Modern weapons of war come with a lot more logistics needs than the old ways, but do not kid yourself - the politicians talking like this are just saying the quiet part out loud. They all dream about being able to shut up their opponents by using force - the command of the U.S. military - to solve their problems. It’s what they do everywhere else… you think they don’t want to try it here?

1. A quick Google search. Good enough for my purposes.

2. One of the untold tales of the first Gulf War was the havoc that sand wreaked on the maintenance times for the much more modern and electronically sophisticated AH-64 Apache helicopter. Numbers of maintenance man-hours per flight hour for an Apache runs north of 10 or 11 hours. If someone thinks I’m lying about any of this, or its importance, here’s a great read from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) Report on the Apache in 1991, post-Gulf War I. https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-92-43.pdf

3. Here’s a quote to support this from the report in FN 2, p.5: “The Longbow Apache has a maintainability goal of 8 hours per flight hour, with a requirement of no more than 13 hours per flight hour. These numbers, however, do not fully account for maintenance needs because the maintenance ratio definition includes only the time spent working on the aircraft. It excludes the time associated with obtaining parts and tools, as well as some time spent diagnosing maintenance problems. Failure to recognize these factors in developing maintenance needs is likely to result in a shortage of personnel to support the Longbow Apache.”

4. This doesn’t include the problem of parts shortages for “MilSpec” items that you could get at the store, but aren’t allowed to because the item has not been specifically certified up to “military specifications.” Yes, I am personally aware of maintenance being held up because of a need for “milspec” washers that we could pick up at the hardware store, but God Forbid the aircraft had crashed with one of those non-spec washers on it.

5. Apologies for any pedantry, but I felt compelled to set up the background before I took this one across the finish line.

6. Helicopters break while you’re on the boat, too!

7. For any American concerned about the direction we’re headed, it’s worth reading Giles Milton’s brilliant narrative from declassified documents, “Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler's Defeat.” Before Churchill became the icon as Prime Minister of the UK, he was first put in charge of Defense of the Home Island; out of that grew many of the characters who would run the global sabotage operations against the Axis powers.