Re-strategizing Army MQ-1C System Sustainment Support Post-Production & Deployment Phase

The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command's (CCDC) Aviation Engineering Directorate's Maintenance Engineering Division provides maintenance engineering support to a variety of Army aircraft systems. The Maintenance Engineering Division has historically supported overhaul, repair and maintenance functions for Army rotary aircraft, but has recently unveiled an avenue of opportunity to support Army unmanned aircraft system platforms as well. The Army's leading unmanned system is the MQ-1C, more frequently referred to as the Gray Eagle. The Maintenance Engineering Division assumed sustainment support of this system post production and deployment phase in the program lifecycle and has had to overcome several obstacles in that process. Even though the Army has provided sustainment support for rotary aircraft for several decades, unmanned aircraft programs in the Army are fairly new territory and a new path was paved to ensure similar sustainment support was provided. Forging this path has proved to be challenging since sustainment support was not well-defined early in the lifecycle even though approximately 70% of program costs are attributed to sustainment efforts on average. Consequently, engineers within the organization were challenged to pursue creative tactics to provide product support to unmanned aircraft in an equivalent manner to manned rotary aircraft, specifically for Gray Eagle Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) in this report. The intent of this report is twofold; (1) inform the engineering community of the unique challenges of Gray Eagle UAS product support team, from a maintenance engineering perspective, and provide further insight into how they were overcome and (2) increase awareness in the acquisition community of the importance in considering sustainment/maintenance support early in the acquisition lifecycle to prevent technical barriers for a product support team with fielded systems.