C-17 - successful deployment of commercial ATE to an Air Force I-level (back-shop) repair facility

In today's world of constrained military budgets, one of the problems the Military faces is the challenge of trying to maintain organic maintenance capabilities. Historically the US Air Force has desired to achieve an autonomous capability to maintain the equipment it uses. This has been achieved traditionally by setting-up 3 levels of maintenance; organizational, intermediate (back-shop) and depot. The I-level back-shops often utilize militarized automatic test equipment (ATE) and test program sets (TPSs) to test today's complex aircraft line replaceable units (LRUs) And even though this is still a cost effective maintenance philosophy, it has become very costly to develop militarized ATE. The DoD (Department of Defense) has been very active in trying to reduce the total ownership cost of ATE in the government inventory. One approach is to utilize commercial, instead of Mil-Spec, ATE. However, utilizing commercial ATE at an USAF back-shop is not without its tradeoffs and challenges as it represents a significant deviation from the way the USAF maintenance squadrons are accustomed to "doing business". This paper documents a current success story of replacing the legacy C-17 I-level ATE with a commercial ATE.