4th battalion of the 159th Combat Aviation Brigade recently returned from a one year deployment to Balad, Iraq where they employed the Goodrich Integrated Mechanical Diagnostic Health and Usage Management System integrated with the Aerosystems International Sapphire Maintenance Management Information System. The system was utilized in every aspect of combat operations from mission planning and replay to all aspects of maintenance operations. Maintenance benefits include scheduled maintenance planning, standard and advanced vibration management, maintenance verification and aircraft system troubleshooting as well as mishap investigations and other Military Flight Operations Quality Assurance purposes. The unit also actively used the system to explore Condition Based Maintenance opportunities by managing what would have been unscheduled maintenance as scheduled maintenance, performing maintenance on components according to health status and by requesting and taking advantage of oil cooler extensions granted based on use of the system. By centering battalion maintenance around an integrated Health and Usage Management and Maintenance Management Information System and by actively using and pushing the envelope of that system, the unit has realized a conservative 4-6% operational readiness increase on 26,000 combat flight hours without dropping a single mission due to maintenance.

This paper is located in the AHS International 63rd Annual Forum (TL716 .A1 A512 2007 VOL. 1).