Air Power: How to keep a Hawk in flight | ADM Feb 2011

Katherine Ziesing | Canberra

Last year, the Hawk Lead in fighter (LIF) fleet celebrated its 10th birthday in Australian service with the RAAF, and reached 60,000 flying hours. With new pilot training programs on the way, the lessons learned from this program could provide some interesting insights for these future programs.

The fleet of 33 RAAF Hawks is split between 76 and 79 Squadrons at RAAF Bases Williamtown and Pearce with 18 and 15 aircraft at the respective sites. BAE Systems is prime contractor for Hawk support, which includes maintenance, supply and engineering activities, with a team of almost 200 people working across both sites.    The majority of the workforce is at RAAF Williamtown in Newcastle and both sites are supported by a RAAF and SME workforce for various tasks.

“We’ve got a routine of five levels of scheduled servicing, currently R1 through to R5. R1 is done by the Squadrons and occurs every 125 hours or 7.5 months whichever is sooner,” BAE Systems general manager of Fast Jet Support Gerry Mann told ADM. “The R2 is done every 250 hours or 15 months. The R3 is done every 500 hours or 30 months. The R4 is 1,000 hours or five years, and the R5 is 2,000 hours or 10 years, and we’re just going through the first R5 cycle at the moment.”

BAE Systems is contracted for Hawk availability and support through until June this year but is in negotiations with the Commonwealth to extend this until mid-2013.

The two year extension to the current base contract aims to provide improvements in performance and cost for the Commonwealth in the environment of the Strategic Reform Program (SRP). The company seems confident of the extension, as it has exceeded the current contracted availability rates comfortably and established a good working relationship over the life of the contract.

“Reliability is pretty good,” Mann said. “The reason I say that is because we’re achieving the graduation rates that the RAAF is looking for. The feedback we’re getting is when pilots go to their operational conversion courses, they’re highly ready, highly suited and well adapted with a high probability of graduation from their next course.”

There is no company-funded development program for the LIF platform but both the Commonwealth and BAE Systems are part of the international Hawk User Group. The large international community sees at least 26 different marks or variants (the RAAF flies the Mark 127) across over 900 aircraft worldwide.

“The different marks have a greater or lesser degree of common use and common configuration but there is a pooling of information, issues, expertise and a chance to network around the common or developing issues, and we take advantage of that,” Mann said.  “We’ve been working with the UK support end (also a BAE Systems operation) for a couple of years now trying to respond to the challenge to take cost of ownership out and take cost out of the training platform, even before SRP came about but certainly responding to strategic reform programs. So, in that light we’ve been looking at what other reference benchmarks might be.

“For example, RAF Hawk operations support and liaison with the Canadian Hawk program, which operates out of the NATO Flying Training Centre in Canada. The aim is to establish relevant support benchmarks to compare the RAAF LIF with. Some are general comparisons because it’s hard to make a direct comparison with different marks.

“One quite specific reference is the similar RAF Mark 128 Advanced Jet Trainer (AJT), where BAE Systems has significant data on common equipment. We’ve been trying to understand what the benchmark levels of support performance are and where we sit against comparable benchmarks. This enables us to use that information with the aim of improving our current operations as well.  

“With the work done on cost reduction and performance improvement in the current contract and the two-year extension proposal, our view is that LIF now compares well against those benchmarks.”

But the life of a RAAF Hawk has not always been smooth sailing. The RAAF’s fleet of Hawk trainers was temporarily grounded following the discovery of cracking in non load-bearing areas of the wing/fuselage joint of at least one jet in 2007. 

“On Tuesday, 23 October 2007 while undergoing a deeper maintenance servicing, a crack was found in a part of the wing support structure of one of the RAAF’s Hawk aircraft,” a Defence spokesperson said at the time. “Local commanders temporarily suspended flying operations while the issue was investigated further.

The crack was found in a part of the wing structure that is not load bearing (the secondary structure).” ADM understands that the fault was not found fleet wide and the fleet was soon back at work.

 The fleet was again grounded mid-last year following technical difficulties during taxiing for take-off. Details of that investigation, which ADM understands is still ongoing, have yet to be released but Mann said the issue had not affected the rest of the fleet. Specific fleet-wide checks were carried out at the time but there were no significant changes to the overall maintenance program, he confirmed. BAE Systems is working closely with the investigation team on the matter.