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Aviation News The seven core beliefs of the French Air Force's Chief of Staff

The seven core beliefs of the French Air Force's Chief of Staff

Helen Chachaty
15 NOV 2017 | 553 words
The seven core beliefs of the French Air Force's Chief of Staff
© Julien Fechter/French Air Force
General Lanata, the Chief of Staff of the French air force, provides the members of the French Parliament's Defence commission with some of his thoughts on aviation maintenance as part of the hearings into the 2018 draft Finance law. Starting from the basic observation that "in all honesty, certain fleets are in poor condition", but "on a macroscopic level, aviation maintenance is achieving performances high than those forecast by the LPM", the Chief of Staff detailed his beliefs, "taking account of the considerable budgetary and operational elements involved, supported by Maintenance in Operational Condition (MOC)".

His first certainty is that "MOC management through operational factors", which would have kick-started aviation activity again, an approach which is preferred to the functional dimension, about which we must "remain cautious".

Next, the Chief of Staff declared that "MOC performance also - and perhaps above all - depends on programming choices". In particular, he called in to question the age of certain fleets, the spare parts stocks, human resources difficulties, the lack of credit or modernisation projects which are running on and on. As an example, General Lanata mentioned the C-135 fleet, whose maintenance workload "has doubled" in ten years and now accounts for 40 hours' maintenance for one hour of flight.

The third point raised by the Chief of Staff was in the increase in MOC costs on new generation aircraft "because their performance is higher". Even if "today we must not regret the consequences of the choices we made", we must now strengthen acknowledgement of MOC from the weapons programme design phase, an area for improvement which had already been discussed in the past "but whose effects will only be felt in the long term".

His fifth conviction was a slight barb aimed in the direction of industrial companies, some of whom (unnamed) he said were "failing in their performance". Lack of engine parts, fragile logistics, industrial difficulties, poor organisation, extended retrofit operations, discovery of "technical events", the list of complaints is long, for all categories of industry.

"There is not just one aviation MOC topic, there are as many topics as there are fleets", stated the Chief of Staff. It is true that "the situation facing the A400M fleet is nothing like the situation for the Tigre or the ATL2", as these aircraft have their own specific problems - cracks, lack of mechanics, age of the fleet and so on.

Finally, "MOC takes a long time", with General Lanata explaining that the effort involves in the scheduled maintenance of equipment for the LPM upgrade in 2015(+500 million) would only be seen from 2018.

During a previous hearing in 2016, the Chief of Staff had presented five priority areas to improve aviation MOC: make SIMMAD the only party responsible for performance and reinforce its strategic vision, encourage platform-based work and bring together government and industrial actors, apply end-to-end logic and establish an information system. The head of the air force also placed a great deal of hope in the aviation MOC mission launched by the Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly in September, a mission which is being led by Christian Chabbert and whose first conclusions should be made public by the end of the year. An "aviation MOC modernisation plan" is also scheduled for the start of 2018.
 
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