http://www.facebook.com/airinternationalmagazine http://www.airinternational.com | 35P&W Military Engines follows up $2 billion F135
contract award with new initiatives
SCENE
Digital depot and fleet command
Pratt & Whitney Military Engines
recently took a strategic decision –
for cost reasons, one which required
the division to justify its thinking
thoroughly to the top management
echelons of Pratt & Whitney and its
parent United Technologies – to
establish a $2 billion military engine
spares holding.
Noting that Pratt & Whitney today is
in the best business cycle it has ever
seen, with P&W Military Engines,
P&W Commercial Engines and Pratt
& Whitney Canada’s small-engine
business “all growing at top-line
rates”, Kevin Kirkpatrick, P&W Military
Engines’ VP sustainment, said of
the spares holding decision: “We’re
loading material we know we’re
going to sell.” The $2 billion figure
represents “a number that’s required
to keep them [the division’s military
customers] flying and a number that
applies across the board to [include
its] international customers.”
Kirkpatrick revealed that “we’re
working with the [US] Defense
Logistics Agency and the [US] Air
Force to do some more commercial
[aviation] like contracting initiatives,”
adding that the new spares holding
“allows us to go out five years or
more” in terms of provisioning
for customers’ future spares
requirements. This ensures that
P&W Military Engines will be able
to deliver spares in timely fashion
to its customers so they can keep
their aircraft in a high state of
mission readiness.
Closely related to the establishment
of the military spares inventory and
to each other, the digital depot
and fleet command initiatives areefforts Kirkpatrick and his team have
launched to digitise many of the work
intensive administrative, oversight
and maintenance scheduling
processes that military engine MRO
traditionally have required.
Together with fleet command, which
aims to establish a fleet management
maintenance programme similar
to those offered for every modern
commercial engine, the digital
depot “helps us look at predictive
maintenance a long time in advance”,
said Bromberg. Using the fact that
the F135 “collects 20 times more
[engine health monitoring] data
per flight than previous engines”,
the digital depot initiative “gives us
a great bunch of data” which Pratt& Whitney’s sophisticated software
can analyse to give early indication
of potential parts failures, well before
those failures happen. This allows
Pratt & Whitney to inform each
engine’s operator well in advance
of an expected failure of a specific
part so that it can replace the part in
time to keep the engine in operation
and the aircraft flying rather than
having to induct it for unscheduled
maintenance. Bromberg estimates
that, by using the digital depot,
operators of Pratt & Whitney military
engines will be able to reduce their
maintenance turnaround times by as
much as 30%.
With the digital depot initiative,
Pratt & Whitney is working withthe F135 maintenance division of
the Oklahoma City Air Logistics
Complex (OK ALC) at Tinker Air
Force Base on several “smaller but
right now” initiatives, Bromberg
said. One is the establishment of
a paperless maintenance records
system at Tinker for F135 MRO,
an initiative P&W and the OK ALC
launched in June. A second is a
programme to scan every blade
aerofoil in every F135 engine to
provide a digital record of the
surface and interior of the blade.
By doing this, said Bromberg,
Pratt & Whitney will be able “to
tell the [maintenance] inspector,
‘Here’s what you need to look at’.”
Chris KjelgaardPratt & Whitney’s GatorWorks
Newly announced by Pratt & Whitney
Military Engines but established about
a year ago in the West Palm Beach
area in Florida is the GatorWorks,
a new rapid-innovation, rapid-
development and rapid-prototyping
unit of fewer than 100 people
which Bromberg categorises as
metaphorically “working in a garage”
to revolutionise the military engine
development cycle. “Pratt & Whitney
Gatorworks will seek to leverage
commercial enterprise capabilities
in rapid prototyping, iterative design,
procurement and testing of cutting-
edge products for our customers,”
said Bromberg.
He said Pratt & Whitney has given
the unit’s staff members just three
working rules: 1) You can make use
of all of Pratt & Whitney’s intellectual
property; 2) Don’t hurt anyone;
and 3) Don’t break any laws. Given
that wide flexibility, Pratt & Whitneyexpects GatorWorks to use chosen
contractors (both internal and external
to P&W itself and which P&W needn’t
actually have used before as suppliers)
to provide three-dimensional digital
design and additive-manufacturing
capabilities to allow rapid
development of a range of projects.
Pratt & Whitney has selected four,
as yet unspecified, projects for
GatorWorks to develop, having
selected them from a list of ten
projects initially suggested. The unit’s
performance is measured by its
ability or otherwise to achieve a set of
milestones for each project by given
deadline dates for each milestone.
If the team meets the deadline for
a given milestone, Pratt & Whitney
will continue to fund the project. If
the team fails to meet the deadline,
the company will stop funding that
project and a new project will be
chosen for development. Chris KjelgaardA Pratt & Whitney F135-PW-100 engine completed a record-breaking accelerated
mission test in the sea level 3 test cell at the Arnold Engineering Development Centre.
Rick Goodfriend/Arnold Engineering Development ComplexBrand new F135 engines await roll-out from Pratt & Whitney’s production line. Pratt & Whitney