Improved Reliability and Maintainability for Fighter Aircraft Environmental Control Systems

Environmental Control System (ECS) features to improve reliability and to reduce maintenance of fighter aircraft are presented. The features are intended to overcome support-ability problems of current fighter aircraft ECS, and to reduce supportability requirements for ECS designs in future aircraft. They have the potential to achieve very significant reductions in failure rates, maintenance, and logistics support for fighter aircraft ECS. Two features offer the highest reliability and maintainability improvements. These are use of digital ECS controls integrated with an aircraft maintenance management system, and the use of more rugged bleed air components to reduce maintenance and logistic support. If these and other improvements are installed, ECS downtime can be reduced by 79% from that of the best in current fighter aircraft.