Setting the requirements for the Royal Air Force's next generation aircraft

Despite the fact that it is extremely early even in the definition of reliability and maintainability targets for the RAF's Future Offensive Aircraft (FOA), the support vision is looking for an aircraft which will have guaranteed periods of availability by staying serviceable, requires only a few maintenance personnel, needs little in the way of specialized support and aircraft ground equipment (AGE), and is thus ready and capable to be deployed and operated anywhere in the world. Traditional reliability and maintainability requirements which allow a specific number of faults and failures are, therefore, considered inadequate for these needs and so a maintenance free operating period (MFOP) concept has been selected, in principle, as the prime reliability and maintainability requirement. By specifying reliability and maintainability in this way it is the intention to drive the design from the bottom up rather than accepting the old top down approach which allocates a number of faults to each system and sub-system. A better understanding of all failure mechanisms will be required as will a more thorough understanding of the environment and usage; the approach will also demand better specification and description of such parameters by the customer. Industry and the customer will therefore have to work together to achieve these new demanding requirements and tackle the considerable technical challenges in partnership from day one of the programme.