Validation of the SmartBasing aircraft rotation and retirement strategy

SmartBasing provides fleet managers tools with which to manage their end-of-life aircraft fleets. The principles of SmartBasing include reassigning aircraft to different bases and assigning aircraft to a new mix of mission types to actively manage the remaining useful lifetime of each aircraft in a fleet. This paper employs a single case study aircraft to validate the SmartBasing approach for a dynamic strategy for aircraft retirement. The United States Air Force’s A-10 Thunderbolt II was used for validation, because it is an aging aircraft fleet that experienced a partial fleet retirement in 2013. The efficacy of the SmartBasing principles was tested using the aircraft retired in 2013 by altering usage patterns and basing locations in the years leading to the 2013 retirement. It was shown that SmartBasing would have been a valid technique for managing the A-10 fleet prior to its partial retirement. Better aircraft utilization planning could have expended more residual aircraft lifetime prior to retirement, resulting in savings of more than 1.88 full aircraft lifetimes or over 83 million USD in aircraft acquisition costs.