Shortage of Mechanics, Spare Parts Puts a Pinch on Military Aircraft

Like a motorist who has learned that his car needs an expensive repair job, Cmdr. Joseph P. Seebald groaned when one of his crewmen announced that the little puddle of goo by the wheels of his C-130 Hercules meant the Coast Guard transport needed new brakes immediately. Unlike the owner of a clunky car, however, Seebald worried that no amount of money could fix his aging airplane.

Having just flown a routine mission to Portsmouth, N.H., Seebald phoned his home base, the Coast Guard Air Station at Elizabeth City, N.C., only to discover that the repair shop did not have a spare brake assembly. Then he learned that the Coast Guard’s East Coast maintenance depot did not have one either.

Aviators in all the armed services increasingly face similar problems and are obliged to cancel or delay missions at an alarming rate, according to senior military officials. The trouble lies in shortages --both of spare parts and of skilled mechanics--that developed during a decade-long reduction in military forces after the end of the Cold War. Although defense spending is rising again, the shortages have had a snowball effect and could take time as well as money to cure, the officials said.

Cannibalization Acute in Jets Most in Demand

A General Accounting Office report last year found that equipment cannibalization was so widespread in the Air Force that maintenance personnel spent 178,000 hours over two years removing parts from B1-B bombers, F-16 fighters and C-5 transports to put in other planes.

Among some of the Navy’s front-line aircraft, cannibalization rates have doubled in the last four years, and the problem is most acute among the jets most in demand--such as the EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare planes that fly along to jam enemy radar and communications almost every time a U.S. warplane goes into harm’s way.

Normally the Coast Guard has five C-130s assigned to Elizabeth City, where they are responsible for conducting long-range search-and-rescue missions, patrolling for fishery violations and stopping the smuggling of drugs and immigrants along the entire East Coast north of Georgia. In the winter, they are also supposed to track icebergs in Atlantic shipping lanes.

When Seebald and his crew found themselves stranded in Portsmouth, one of the five planes was undergoing long-term maintenance and another was hauling a load of cocaine seized from a smuggler. To get Seebald’s plane flying again, a brake assembly was cannibalized from one of the two remaining planes, and the other had to fly the spare parts to New Hampshire.

“For the better part of a day, the only aircraft we had available for any missions was the one that was flying the brakes up to me,” Seebald said. “Thank God we did not have any emergencies. It would be hard to explain to someone’s family that we couldn’t get to a sinking boat in time because there weren’t any spare brakes.”

That nightmare is real, according to Adm. James M. Loy, the Coast Guard commandant. “Lack of readiness may already be costing us lives,” he said.

Loy recalls the Sacramento Air Station’s response to a distress signal from a boat 500 miles off California last November. Of the four C-130s assigned to the base, one had been a “hangar queen” for more than seven months since it was first cannibalized for spare parts. Another was away on a drug-interdiction mission.

Only One Plane Able to Answer Emergency

When the emergency call came in, mechanics had just taken apart one of the two remaining airplanes for routine maintenance.

The sole C-130 in working order flew out to find a dismasted sailboat battling 70-mph winds. After calling for a Coast Guard cutter, the plane tried dropping emergency supplies to the solo sailor aboard the boat. But the C-130 could not watch over the boat for the hours it would take the cutter to arrive, and the Coast Guard plane headed home while an Air National Guard C-130 from Oregon was dispatched to help. By the time it arrived, however, the distress beacon had gone silent and the boat had disappeared. A massive search over the next six days turned up only debris.

In response to such difficulties, Coast Guard commanders for both the Atlantic and Pacific advised headquarters in January that they could no longer meet their assignments and were cutting operating hours for C-130s by 10%, a senior official said. Subsequent cuts will come for helicopters, cutters and other vessels that rely on the aircraft to conduct long-range searches.

While the Coast Guard’s maintenance problems have the most visible impact in peacetime, similar difficulties are evident in all the military services. During the Kosovo campaign last spring, the Air Force succeeded in keeping 400 planes in the air--but only at the cost of stripping parts from units left out of the war.

“Cannibalization is a particularly vicious short-term fix because it’s so time-consuming that other maintenance operations inevitably get delayed, compounding the whole problem,” said a senior Pentagon official.

Taking a part from an airplane, rather than from a supply shelf, can consume hours of a mechanic’s time. Moreover, the part must be logged so that maintenance schedules are kept up to date and it can be replaced.

“Even the most routine operations can take three times as long as they are supposed to,” said Cmdr. J.J. O’Connor, head of the Coast Guard’s C-130 program.

Today’s spare-parts shortage has its roots in the abundant defense budgets of the 1980s, according to recent congressional testimony by Defense Department Comptroller William J. Lynn and other military officials. When the Cold War ended in 1989, the armed forces had huge inventories of spares. As the size of the military shrank during the 1990s, maintenance depots lived off their inventories. To cut spending further, the military reduced its ability to overhaul parts and began to rely on “just-in-time” delivery practices common in the private sector, where parts are ordered as needed.

As the reduced military faced increased demands on its aircraft for missions in the Balkans, Iraq and elsewhere, the shortages started to bite. Over the last three Defense Department budgets, spending on spare parts has increased 40%, but the money has been slow to have an impact. The lead time for manufacturing complex parts stretches up to 24 months, Pentagon officials said. In many cases there is no ready source for the spares today because many firms that had supplied parts to the military found other things to do during the dry days of the 1990s.

“Losing our most experienced maintenance people to the civilian sector is as much of a problem as parts shortages,” said Thomas K. Longstreth, deputy undersecretary of defense for readiness.