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Oil prices reshape how Air Force flies, trains

When the Air Force leadership met in June, the top agenda item was how to make the service more fuel-efficient, a drive that will change how the world’s leading user of fossil fuels flies, trains and even fights.

“At the end of the day, we’re about getting the mission done,” Gen. Michael Moseley, then the service’s chief of staff, said during the conference at Scott Air Force Base, Ill. “But jet fuel is $162 a barrel and going up, so we’ve got to be smarter about how we do it.”

The soaring price of oil is a big deal for an organization that spends some $13 billion annually to power its force. As a rule of thumb, each 1 percent increase in jet fuel prices costs the service $23 million a year.

For comparison’s sake, the Air Force consumes as much fuel as United, American and Delta airlines combined. The largest chunk — 42 percent — is burned by hundreds of transport and tanker planes. The service’s transport arm, the Air Mobility Command, uses $6 billion in fuel each year, more than United.

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Rebecca Grant, an analyst with the Lexington Institute, weighs in on Air Force fuel use

Newer planes would be more fuel-efficient, but today’s Air Force is running older planes for much longer than anticipated, with only cloudy replacement plans.

“Guys, we’re on an oil platform that’s on fire in the middle of a hurricane,” one four-star general told his counterparts at the leadership conference.

So the Air Force must change, spend less time flying, and get the job done by being smarter. The service has enlisted help from United, seeking tips from an industry that is also working to cut operating costs.

The initiative is part of the Air Force Smart Operations 21 efficiency effort launched by Moseley and former Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne. Both officials were fired last month in the wake of a nuclear security scandal.

The key to the initiative, according to top leaders, is “management by fact” rather than “lore,” and a rule that says, “what gets measured, gets managed.”

For starters, the service plans to change the way airlifters hopscotch around the country to pick up aircrews and equipment before starting a mission. At the Illinois meeting, a four-star general quipped it would be cheaper to fly the aircrews around the country on commercial aircraft in first class than fly four-engine transport planes to meet them. Instead of launching a plane from Charleston, S.C., and moving it to several bases to pick up crew and equipment before loading cargo at Fort Bragg, N.C., Air Mobility Command (AMC) will send the airplane directly to the Army base where it will be joined by all the aircrew and gear it needs. This will also save wear and tear on aging airplanes.

In some cases, Air Force personnel will buy airline tickets in order to meet their aircraft. That’s going to take a cultural shift.

“There’s some sense of ‘don’t tell me I have to use commercial air,’ ” Wynne said in an interview. “You’re going to have to get off of that.”

New mission-planning systems will help AMC plot the most fuel-efficient way to do business. Better planning can tailor arrivals and departures, as more efficient diplomatic clearances can avoid gas wasted flying around denied airspace. AMC will spend about $17 million on a project to more efficiently plan KC-10 tanker flights. The project should help the command save more than $240 million in fuel. A similar project is slated for the KC-135 tanker fleet.

Another way to reduce fuel use is to reduce the weight being flown aboard by Air Force planes. An Illinois Air National Guard KC-135 squadron stripped some 1,200 pounds of gear from its planes, including parachutes and spare life rafts that have never seen use in the planes’ half-century of operations. AMC officials have decreed that the entire KC-135 fleet will follow that lead, and are now eyeing similar efforts for other aircraft types.

Taking a cue from United, the Air Force plans to fly planes with less gas aboard them, saving weight and boosting gas mileage. Planes will carry enough fuel to get them to their destinations, plus a suitable safety margin.

“We have stripped a huge amount of weight out of the airplanes by simply tailoring for the mission,” Wynne said in an interview. “We used to just fill it all the way up.”

“Filling up would also cause us to land heavy on our equipment, causing us to damage our aircraft. It needs to be holistically looked at. It could save them 10 percent of their fuel usage. It would be $600 million annually.”

Savings on the ground

There are ways to save fuel on the ground as well, including taxiing with just one engine, reducing the use of fuel-guzzling auxiliary power units, delaying engine starts until just before taxiing, and loading cargo toward the rear of the plane.

Maintenance can help improve fuel efficiency; for example, tuning flight controls and regularly washing engine compressors to remove soot and grime. The fuel efficiency of each aircraft is being tracked so that “high burn” aircraft can be identified and fixed.

Then there are training changes. C-17 transport pilots are certified on their planes after 70 hours in a high-fidelity simulator and only four hours in the cockpit of the real plane. The key is sophisticated full motion simulators that can effectively substitute for the real thing. Officials with the Air Education and Training Command are assessing whether other aircraft types can do as well.

Even fighter training may change. The complexities of air combat mean fighter pilots need more air time. Still, the ratio of real flight training and simulator training will shift toward more time on the ground. One Air Force four-star general suggested that pilots bound to fly the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter may log 35 hours in trainers and 35 hours in the cockpit before they’re qualified on the jet.

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John T. Bennett contributed to this report.

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