AVIATION AFTERMARKET DEFENSE DEFENSE THE BEST PUTTING THE FIGHT BACK IN THE F-5 EDUCATION ASSISTANCE FLYING PHANTOMS SWITZERLAND

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1 THE BEST Aftermarket Suppliers for Fighters, Helicopters and Transports AVIATION AFTERMARKET DEFENSE DEFENSE Sustainment and Modernization SUMMER 2009 Vol. 5, No. 2 PUTTING THE FIGHT BACK IN THE F-5 Northrop Grumman and the U.S. Navy team up to rejuvenate an aging warrior. EDUCATION ASSISTANCE Opportunities for Post 9/11 Veterans FROM: AAD/116 Radio Circle/Ste 302/MT. KISCO/NY/ FLYING PHANTOMS After half a century, European operators are keeping these rugged fighters in the skies. C-130 TO LEADING PROVIDERS WHO TO TURN FIRST An Eagle Eye On SWITZERLAND Aircraft & Industry

2 The call to Northrop Grumman Corporation's F-5 program management team came not long after the company won the contract to provide depot-level maintenance for the U.S. Navy's fleet of the twin-engine light attack aircraft in Northrop Grumman structural engineers had refined the algorithms used to calculate the fatigue life of the F-5E, also known as the Tiger II, and they had discovered that the airframes of the supersonic fighter were a lot farther along in their service lives than anyone had realized. "I remember the call well," says Mike Ingalls, then a team member and today Northrop Grumman's F-5 Integrated Product Team Lead. "It was pretty much a state of panic, because we were not expecting it." The offspring of a merger of Northrop (which designed and built the F-5E, as well as its predecessor, the F-5A Freedom Fighter), Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumman immediately scheduled an operator's conference at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Patuxent River, Maryland. Ingalls recalls that the conference was called "so we could talk through the problem and figure out the best way forward, and how to keep the airplane in service." A GLOBAL ISSUE HITS CLOSE TO HOME The armed forces of more than two-dozen nations operate F5-Es, making the aging of this model's airframe an international concern. But the problem hit hardest in the United States, where the Tiger II serves as the U.S. Navy's adversary aircraft, mimicking the MiG-21 and MiG-28 in fighter pilot air combat training. And the Navy's F-5Es were among the highest flight times and the most fatigued in service. 14 AVIATION AFTERMARKET DEFENSE SUMMER IMAGE COURTESY OF SWISS AIR FORCE

3 INNOVATIVE SOLUTION "The U.S. Navy flies a tremendous amount of flight hours per year, especially in the adversary world," notes Ingalls. "So the life was being used up at rapid rate on the F-5s they were flying." In fact, Northrop Grumman's findings were confirmed in a 2001 study by the U.S. Naval Air Systems Command, which determined that fatigue life values for its fleet of F-5Es had reached an average of 79 percent per aircraft. Northrop Grumman and the U.S. Navy teamed up to develop a plan of action. "In 2001, we started putting things together," says Jay Bolles, the U.S. Navy's Integrated Program Team Lead for Adversary Aircraft in PMA-207 (PMA stands for Program Management, Air), based in Patuxent River. "That's when the program began." The resulting F-5 acquisition/recapitalization program marked its successful conclusion this past April at Northrop Grumman's East Coast Aircraft Manufacturing and Flight Test Center in St. Augustine, Florida. At a ceremony attended by company employees and U.S. Navy managers and fighter pilots, Northrop Grumman delivered the last of forty-four refurbished Tiger IIs converted under the program to the U.S. Navy. "The objective of this program was to achieve a cost-effective solution for providing our naval aviators with real-time, hands-on training to simulate enemy PUTTING THE FIGHT BACK IN THE F-5 Northrop Grumman and the U.S. Navy team up to rejuvenate an aging warrior. BY JAMES WYNBRANDT aircraft in aerial combat training exercises, which only platforms like the F-5 can deliver," said Captain James Wallace, PMA 207 Program Manager, in accepting the aircraft. "Clearly, we achieved that goal." "The team's ability to deliver on our contract commitments is a testament to the talent of our U.S. Navy-Northrop Grumman team," Rick Matthews, Site Manager of the St. Augustine facility and the company's Vice President for East Coast Production Operations, commented just before documents marking the official transfer of the refurbished Tiger II were signed. CRAFTING AN INNOVATIVE SOLUTION In accomplishing their objective, Northrop Grumman and the U.S. Navy broke new ground in aftermarket support, crafting a unique solution that likely will become a refurbishment model for other platforms, as well as for other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and armed forces faced with the challenges of aging aircraft, shrinking budgets, and a need to maintain the operational readiness of their fleets. Following the ceremony, Ingalls and Bolles discussed the program with Aviation Aftermarket Defense. According to Ingalls, even without the fatigue issue, there were budgetary challenges to continuing the service of the F-5E model, which first flew in As legacy components and systems wore out and broke down, the aircraft were becoming increasingly expensive to maintain, an issue the Northrop Grumman team tackled early on. "We looked at what we call 'cost avoidance,' what it would cost over X number of years to maintain the aircraft as is, and then what it would cost to upgrade and put a new, off-the-shelf, state-of-theart system in it," Ingalls says. "And we AVIATION AFTERMARKET DEFENSE SUMMER

4 were able to put together a business case [for upgrading] that said, 'You're going to save a tremendous amount of money!'" The solution Northrop Grumman and the U.S. Navy ultimately developed required as much diplomacy as engineering and manufacturing skill. As it turns out, Switzerland was among the countries operating F-5Es, with a fleet of more than seventy of the aircraft. Acquired as fighters, the F-5Es increasingly were relegated to training missions, as the Swiss took delivery of F- 18s, making much of the F-5E fleet expendable. In addition, the Swiss F-5Es averaged only about 2,500 hours on the airframe, while the U.S. Navy's Tiger IIs averaged about 7,000 flight hours. The Swiss aircraft also were built with Improved Handling Quality systems, sharper noses, and improved leading edge roots on the wings and automatic flaps, giving them better performance than the U.S. Navy's F-5Es. Northrop Grumman engineers determined that they could combine parts from one Swiss F-5E and one U.S. Navy F- 5E to create a refurbished aircraft. But would Switzerland sell their Tiger IIs? The answer was complicated by the Swiss constitution, which makes decisions of this type subject to strict accountability and public approval. After what Bolles describes as "many, many meetings" with officials in Switzerland, a sales agreement was concluded "and it blossomed into the conversion program." Delighted with the novel buyback plan, managers even gave their effort a new name: "We renamed the program as a 'Reverse FMS' [Foreign Military Sale]," says Bolles. "It's never been done before." Adds Ingalls, "It's something that the United States normally doesn't do: sell an airplane to Switzerland or some other country and then buy it back." The program called for converting thirty-two aircraft, a number later increased to forty-four, to provide enough aircraft to establish an adversary-training base in Key West, Florida. The U.S. Navy paid $50 million for the forty-four aircraft and the subsequent conversions cost about $1 million each. In the end, the fly away cost of the converted F-5s was about $1.4 million per aircraft. THE CONVERSION PROCESS Deliveries of the Swiss F-5Es commenced in 2003 at the rate of about one per month. The aircraft were disassembled at the RUAG facility in Emmen, Switzerland (RUAG is the Swiss Air Force's industry partner), packed in a frame designed and built by Northrop Grumman, and flown aboard a U.S. Navy C-130T to St. Augustine, where the conversion work was performed. After completing disassembly and stripping all paint off the parts, the airframe, control surfaces, and components were inspected by X-ray and other non-destructive testing (NDT) methods. Fatigue critical components were replaced, and areas of the aft fuselage subject to high fatigue were refurbished. Newly designed upper cockpit longerons were installed, increasing the airframe's integrity. The aircraft also were given an avionics upgrade, bringing them into the twenty-first century. A navigation/radar display kit replaced five legacy components - the inertial navigation system, inertial navigation display system (INDS) adapter, magnetic azimuth indicator, radar video indicator, and radar control - with two state-of-the-art line replaceable units (LRUs). The kit includes the LN-260, Northrup Grumman's new inertial navigation system. Completely integrated with a twenty-four-channel, selective availability/anti-spoofing modulecompliant embedded GPS receiver, the LN-260 uses an advanced fiber optic gyroscope-based inertial sensor assembly. Its open-system architecture is designed to be readily adaptable to new applications and new system requirements that improve performance of mission equipment and flight control systems. A new integrated control display unit and radar display were part of the panel upgrade. The aircraft also were completely rewired. A new gaseous oxygen system replaced the legacy liquid oxygen system to reduce costs, and an anti-skid braking system was added to help bring the aircraft to a safe stop on wet runways. 16 AVIATION AFTERMARKET DEFENSE SUMMER

5 INNOVATIVE SOLUTION Each conversion took about 5 months. The resulting variant of the single-seat F-5E is the F-5N. Forty-one were created, along with three two-seat trainers, which retain the two-seater's designation as the F-5F. Sixteen of the converted aircraft are based with VFC-111, the "Sundowners" at U.S. Naval Air Station Key West, Florida. Their pilots fly adversary-training missions against carrier battle group pilots during the groups' pre-deployment exercises. The other refurbished Tiger IIs are assigned to VFC-13, the "Fighting Saints" at U.S. Naval Air Station Fallon, Nevada, home of the U.S. Naval Strike and Air Warfare Center (NSAWC), and to the U.S. Marine adversary squadron VMFT 401 in Yuma, Arizona. AFTERMARKET CARE CONSIDERATIONS The delivery of the last F-5N, tail number , originally built 33 years ago, marks a new chapter in the Northrop Grumman-U.S. Navy partnership. "It's not over. This is just the end of the acquisition," Bolles says. Northrop Grumman will assume depot-level maintenance responsibilities for the aggressor fleet, as it has for the F- 5E. Several factors underlie this arrangement. First, a number of U.S. Navy depots have closed in recent years, leaving little capacity for taking on additional projects. "Navy depots are overloaded and over-tasked taking care of our core aircraft," Bolles says. Another complication is that the U.S. Navy depots typically only work on aircraft designed for the Navy, which has its own design philosophy and design criteria (primarily relating to the demands of aircraft carrier operations), whereas the F-5 originally was designed and built for the U.S. Air Force. Additionally, Northrup Grumman, as the OEM, retains the rights to the design and blueprints, making it more cost effective for the company, rather than the Navy, to handle the depot maintenance. Moreover, the company has significant experience developing lifeextension programs for the aircraft for the U.S. Air Force. Under the depot maintenance arrangement, every 4 years, each F-5N/F will return to the St. Augustine facility for complete inspection and any needed refurbishment. "The whole idea is to reduce the amount of time the aircraft would spend in significant maintenance at the [Navy] sites, and allow the Navy to concentrate on what they need to do, which is fly the airplane and train the warfighter," says Ingalls. "That's what it's really all about." On-site maintenance for the F-5N/Fs serviced in Key West, Fallon, and Yuma is provided by Sikorsky Aerospace Maintenance. FLYING INTO THE FUTURE The plan will keep the F-5N fleet flying its mission at least to fiscal year 2015, as mandated by the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. And it is likely that the fleet will fly much longer. "These aircraft could serve our country and our warfighters well into the 2020s," Bolles says, adding, "The lessons that we've learned over the past 6 years could absolutely be used in other programs. In fact, we get calls from other services asking, 'How did you do that?'" Meanwhile, operators of the more than 1,000 F-5E/Fs that are in the service of over twenty foreign nations - many with legacy inertial navigation systems dating from the early 1970s and 1980s - are taking notice of Northrop Grumman's upgrade and life-extension capabilities. "Over the last 12 months, we have traveled to some fairly significant market areas, and we have received requests for proposals," Ingalls says. "They want to adopt the programs that we have jointly established with the U.S. Navy here in St. Augustine and implement them in their country." It bears noting that the first European known to visit St. Augustine, Ponce de Leon, came looking for the fabled Fountain of Youth. That is exactly what Tiger II operators are just now discovering here 500 years later. AAD AVIATION AFTERMARKET DEFENSE SUMMER