awarded a $75 million contract for
V- 22 logistics support of the
engines for both versions in March.
Vern Lochausen, Bell-Boeing’s
director of sustainment for V- 22,
said the objective of PBL is, among
other things, “improved aircraft
reliability, mission availability
[and] aircraft maintainability.”
For example, over the course of
the program, the Navy is going to run
into problems it has not seen before
and are not in the technical manual,
so the service will have to reach out
to Bell-Boeing and get an answer.
“The metric is, we have a goal of
getting the maximum number of
[answers] in the shortest period of
time,” Lochausen said. “Getting
the answer to the fleet maintainer
since we’ve been on performance-
based logistics, the majority of
them they get less [in] than two
hours, which means it’s in the
same work shift. If you’re a guy on
the flight line, you don’t want to sit
around until the next shift to figure
out how to go forward.”
To think about it in a different way, if Bell-Boeing is
getting a lot of requests for answers, “maybe the tech
manuals are not that good,” he said. “This airplane has
been criticized for that in the past, but there are inter-
active tech manuals so, basically, when you go to main-
tain the airplane, there is a laptop that has trou-
bleshooting procedures.”
Since the company has gone under PBL, Lochausen
said, the volume of those requests has fallen by 50 per-
cent since 2010, and 70 percent since 2009.
If the company determines something is missing or
incorrect in the manual, “we immediately go to the
tech manual guys and say, ‘OK, figure out if something
is wrong with the manual or if this is a new one or if
we need an update,’” he said. “Periodically, we do
update the manuals.”
Bell-Boeing also will do engineering investigations if
it comes across a problem where a component fails in
a way that crews have never seen before.
“That is introduced into engineering shops,”
Lochausen said. “The metric there is, if you have a problem, you don’t want to spend a lot of time figuring it out.”
He claimed Bell-Boeing has reduced the time it takes
to do those engineering investigations by 40 percent
under the PBL.
A key element to those metrics are award fees, he said.
U.S. MARINE CORPS
A Marine MV- 22 Osprey lands Nov. 25 at Forward Operating Base Jackson in
Sangin, Afghanistan, occupied by Marines with 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, Afghan
National Army Soldiers and Afghan Uniformed Police. Keeping the MV-22s flying
in the harsh, dusty environment of Afghanistan, without having to absorb astro-
nomical costs, presents significant challenges.
“We’ve got a pretty robust team on the logistics, the
engineering side, the programmatics,” Masiello said.
The program and manufacturer Bell-Boeing maintain
the aircraft through what is known as a performance-based logistics (PBL) approach. In a PBL-type deal, the
Marines contract not for goods and services, but for the
contractor to meet certain performance metrics for the
platform. The idea is to incentivize the contractor to
keep the aircraft flying with minimal maintenance.
“We’ve got a V- 22 joint sustainment concept that
covers a multitude of contractual vehicles and activi-
ties, including multiple PBLs,” Masiello said. “PBL
itself is that sustainment strategy. It capitalizes on
managing the supplier as opposed to the individual
item, and the incentive structure is supposed to give
the supplier [the incentive] to build inherent reliabili-
ties into the product.”
He said the program also has had a “power-by-the-
hour” — now referred to as “mission care” — PBL con-
tract with engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce “since
their inception,” so “we’ve got experience through the
life of the program on PBL.”
Bell-Boeing was awarded a $581 million contract for
PBL work on both the Marine Corps and Air Force ver-
sions of the V- 22 in January 2009, and a second con-
tract for $11 million in June 2009. Rolls-Royce was
