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Aging Orions limp to the finish

Nearly one year after the Navy grounded about 25 percent of its P-3 Orion maritime patrol fleet, those troubled aircraft are starting to emerge from the depot pipeline and return to service.

But whether the aging planes can survive until their replacements come isn’t certain.

“We sure hope the worst is behind us,” said Rear Adm. Bill Moran, commander of Patrol and Reconnaissance Group, the Norfolk, Va.-based command that oversees both Atlantic and Pacific patrol and reconnaissance squadrons. “But in aviation, you learn never to be surprised.”

The Navy has four years before it starts replacing P-3s with next-generation maritime patrol aircraft, the P-8A Poseidon. And keeping the aging fleet — the average P-3 is 29 years old — up and running is proving to be no small task.

The challenge intensified in December, when the 39 aircraft — one quarter of the Navy’s 160 P-3s — were grounded because of fears that wing sections suffering “structural fatigue” could break off in flight. Another P-3 was grounded in March.

Workers spent 21,000 man-hours to make the first aircraft ready for duty this month, replacing and rebuilding large parts of the wings. Similar repairs are underway on most of the aircraft; three have been removed from service entirely.

On top of that, the past six months have seen two Class A mishaps — incidents that cause at least $1 million in damage or involve the death of a crew member — involving Orions, after 10 years with none.

Concerns about the P-3s’ waning lifespan recently led the Navy to move up the start date for the first Poseidon squadron to early fiscal 2013, nine months earlier than originally planned.

“There is a sense of urgency there, that they want to get the aircraft built,” said Douglas Royce, a defense aviation analyst at Forecast International, a Connecticut-based consulting group.

That sense of urgency is driven not only by the age of the aircraft, but also by the P-3’s expanded missions.

Originally designed to locate submarines over open seas, the lumbering turboprop now is routinely deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan for land-based recon missions that include scanning for improvised explosive devices.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have pressured the Pentagon to replace the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capability as soon as possible.

“The specific need to address the counter-IED mission that the P-3s were performing in Iraq, that apparently is either being done on a limited basis or not being done at all,” Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., said at a hearing with military officials in March.

“So what is being done to perform that mission? How much of a mission drop-off have we had with the grounding of the P-3s? What is the plan to get us back up to where we were prior to the grounding of the P-3s?” Taylor asked.

Rear Adm. Allen Myers answered that both the P-3’s Iraq mission and what was being done to mitigate the aircraft reductions were classified. But he said concerns about the P-3 are not unique and instead were emblematic of challenges the Navy faces with aging aircraft and high operational tempo.

“The recent P-3 groundings are but one example of the operational strain,” Allen said at the congressional hearing.

Navy spokesman Lt. Clay Doss in early November also declined to say how the Navy has compensated for the reduced fleet capacity, but he echoed concerns about the fleet.

“The recent P-3 groundings are an example of the fiscal realities and operational strain on our aircraft which contribute to the moderate risks assumed in naval aviation. The new P-8A Poseidon aircraft will recapitalize on the aging P-3s and the Navy’s maritime patrol anti-submarine warfare capabilities,” Doss said in a written statement.

More with less

In the meantime, the P-3 community is doing more with less, putting extra work and stress on the aviators and sailors who fly and maintain the Orion fleet.

The number of P-3s has dropped from 238 in 2000 to 157 in 2008.

The average P-3 has nearly 16,000 flight hours, more than double the original design specification of 7,500.

The percentage of aircraft in the depot has nearly doubled in recent years, from about 24 percent in 2000 to 41 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, the number of flight hours has dropped by a quarter, from about 71,000 in 2000 to about 54,000 in 2008.

“It’s not easy,” Moran told Navy Times. “The [commanding officers] have had to bite the bullet and work people harder. ... We are getting it done, and it’s very challenging.”

While the aircraft routinely deploy for missions over Iraq and Afghanistan, the wing continues to train for its traditional anti-submarine warfare mission, Moran said.

“We have had to add some training to make sure the crews are ready to do that ISR mission,” Moran said.

Stress on the fleet led to at least one of the two major mishaps in the past six months. In late July, a pilot lost control of a P-3 during a training exercise near Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, Wash. The plane plunged 5,500 feet and pulled 7 Gs before the pilot regained control just a few hundred feet from the ground. No one was injured.

An investigation found that the aircraft was “overstressed” after one engine failed and put extreme stress on the remaining engine, according to the Naval Safety Center.

The precise cause of the engine failure is still under investigation, a Navy official said.

The second mishap came in October in Afghanistan when a squadron commander, Cmdr. Llewellyn Lewis, overshot a runway at Bagram Air Base. The P-3 Orion “Reef Point,” which includes long-range cameras and electro-optical sensors, went up in flames and was severely damaged. One crew member suffered a broken ankle.

Lewis was removed from command of Special Projects Patrol Squadron 1, which is based at Naval Air Station Brunswick, Maine, and the crash remains under investigation.

Reducing stress

The Navy has taken several measures to preserve the life of the planes, including reducing the landings pilots are required to make each month in order to remain current. In 2004, the requirement dropped from six landings per month to three.

More advanced flight simulators have helped pilots maintain flight skills despite the reduced requirements. “At home we are training to a standard that has been the standard for a very long time,” Moran said.

The Navy has also shifted where it bases deployed P-3s to reduce flight times. Although they have a range of roughly 5,600 miles and can conduct missions far from their home station, the Navy has moved some them closer to war zones to reduce the flight hours on each mission. Officials declined to say where the planes are based.

“When the war kicked off, we were flying heavily from bases that were quite a distance away from the fight. So we sat back and analyzed the amount of hours we were putting on the aircraft,” Moran said. “We relocated and we got closer to the fight and reduced a lot of the transit time in a big way.”

At home, having fewer aircraft available for training has forced the Patrol and Reconnaissance Group to adjust training schedules, putting more air crews to work on nights and weekends to complete the necessary training.

“The pressure to want to keep those airplanes up at a greater rate is significant. You don’t have a lot of spares. If an airplane goes down in the middle of preflight [inspections], you don’t necessarily have anything that is sitting to the right or the left,” Moran said.

Despite the age of the aircraft, Moran said there will be no “gap” between now and the arrival of the first Poseidons.

“There is no gap, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been invested in sustainment,” Moran said. “Naval aviation and Big Navy and [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] and Capitol Hill have all recognized that.”

The P-3 Orion is a plane that has a lot of life in it, said John Duke, who flew P-3s before retiring from the Navy and helping to oversee the maintenance of the P-3 fleet operated by the U.S. Customs Service. Duke said he’s worked on P-3s that have clocked more than 26,000 flight hours.

“That’s a tough old airplane,” Duke said in a telephone interview from his home in Waco, Texas. “I’ve flown over 1,000 hours and I’ve never been scared in one as far as catastrophic failure.”