Air Force Grounds Four JSTARS Over Maintenance Concerns | Defense News

WASHINGTON -- The US Air Force has grounded four of its limited JSTARS aircraft over concerns about maintenance work performed at the Northrop Grumman-led depot, Defense News has learned.

The four planes are being inspected for any possible safety of flight issues on the ground at Robins Air Force Base, Ga., home of the 116th Air Control Wing. An independent review team is also being assembled to “inspect and validate quality assurance processes at the contractor's depot,” a service spokesman said.

Gen. Ellen Pawlikowski, the head of Air Force Material Command, explained to Defense News on Sept. 21 that she was ordering the planes be grounded after a series of quality issues were discovered on planes that had gone through the depot recently.

“I have a letter that I signed just recently off to [Lt. Gen. John Thompson, the commander of Air Force Life Cycle Management Center] asking him to put together a team to take a look at what the Northrop Grumman facility that is the depot, to take a look at their maintenance and their quality assurance activities,” Pawlikowski explained. “I also recommended to the PEO and to [Gen. Hawk Carlisle, the head of Air Combat Command] that we do safety of flight inspections on the airplanes that have left the depot since January. Because we’ve had a couple of mishaps.”

“We’re optimistic that we’re not talking about an extensive grounding of those airplanes, so there’s no intention to bring them back to the depot or anything,” she added. “But we did recommend that they not be flown until we do the additional inspections.”

The service spokesman added that AFMC is “re-inspecting these four aircraft to identify and resolve any safety of flight issues. The Air Force will decide what needs to be done to return the aircraft to operational flight status as soon as possible, based on the inspection findings.”
The Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System fleet consists of 16 operational planes and one training platform. The design is based around militarized Boeing 707s that come equipped with a sophisticated radar and battle management suite.

The planes are in high demand for coordinating forces around the globe, with over 125,000 combat hours flown since the September 11, 2001, attacks. That stress occurs on platforms that are already heavily aged, and for which many parts are no longer in production. The fleet undergoes regular maintenance at the Northrop Grumman Technical Services operations in Lake Charles, La.

Boeing, Northrop and Lockheed Martin are all hoping to win the roughly $6.5 billion contract to produce 17 new JSTARS designs. The Air Force plans to downselect to one competitor and award an engineering, manufacturing and design contract in fiscal year 2018, although the service this week announced its expected Request for Proposal will be delayed due to congressional concerns over the format of the contract.

In a statement, Georgia Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson said the grounding of the planes is proof the AIr Force needs to start "expediting the process" for acquiring a JSTARS replacement.

"We have heard for years about the looming capabilities gap that will occur when the current fleet of JSTARS aircraft are forced out of commission before a new replacement fleet is ready,” Isakson said “Today’s news is further evidence of the instability and the urgent need for recapitalization to be a higher priority for the Air Force. Our warfighters combating ISIL and other terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East depend on JSTARS for its unmatched coordination of battle management and intelligence capabilities."

Northrop Facility Concerns

The decision to ground the planes came after a team tasked with looking into the series of mishaps raised concerns about the work being done at the Northrop facility.

“The team that is looking at this came to me and said, ‘We’re just a little concerned with the number of mishaps,’ and it seems to have been with the facility, the airplanes that had just recently come out of there,” Pawlikowski explained. “So I just felt it was prudent to make sure that since there was some concern about, and evidence of, mishaps happening as a result of things that weren’t quite right on the airplanes, that we take a look at those airplanes.”

Pawlikowski said the issues discovered on the JSTARS fleet were largely Class C ($50,000 to $500,000 in repairs, according to a definition in a March 2015 guidance document) or Class D ($20,000 to $50,000 in repairs) mishaps, though there was at least one Class A issue ($2 million or more) that was discovered with a JSTARS aircraft.

The Class A mishap occurred “where we had some water in a place in the airplane it wasn’t supposed to be there and it looked like somebody hadn’t put some plugs in,” Pawlikowski said. “I can’t talk much about that because there’s an ongoing investigation.” Over the last year, Air Force officials have been working with Northrop at the depot location to try and find ways to speed up the work being done there, with an eye on getting the much-needed planes back into the field as quickly as possible. That includes drawing on maintenance experience from the KC-135 tanker, another aging platform.

That has resulted in service officials being present more often in the depot than in the past, something Northrop has been “very receptive” to, said Pawlikowski – which is why she admits to being “a little surprised” that these problems have been cropping up.

“Maybe our focus on improving the throughput, sometimes when people get motivated to go faster,” they cut corners, Pawlikowski mused, before adding that she isn’t going to draw conclusions until the team assembled by Thompson has investigated the facility.

That investigation team will also involve stakeholders from Air Combat Command, the Air National Guard, and the Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA).

Asked about potential punishment for Northrop should they be found to have been negligent, Pawlikowski said: “That’s all part of what we’re going to go in, and look at, and understand.” That final decision will fall under Thompson’s team, she added, as DCMA has the authority to issue notice to a contractor if corrective action is needed.

“Whatever comes out of this will play out through the contracting authorities that DCMA executes for us,” she said.

Bryan Lima, Northrop’s director for the JSTARS program, said in a statement the company is “committed to quality and safety, and we are working with the Air Force to ensure that the Joint STARS aircraft are mission-ready.”