A Non-Traditional Approach to Improving Fleet Supportability

Parts obsolescence in military avionics is inevitable. The typical acquisition program for new military avionics systems requires a minimum of five years from concept exploration to fleet deployment. By the time the new system is deployed in the fleet, it is usually well behind the current state-of-the-art. Often, the threat that the system was designed to counter has been replaced by a different, newer threat for which the system was not designed. It is also possible that the components and processes that were used to develop the system have become obsolete, so that replacement parts are no longer available. In either case, some action must be taken to resolve the obsolescence problem.