AFSO21 event helps plan fuel conservation initiatives

  • Published
  • By Airman 1st Class Rachel Waller
  • 100th Air Refueling Wing Public Affairs
RAF MILDENHALL, England --  Members from the 100th Operations Group, the 100th Maintenance Group and the 100th Logistics Readiness Squadron recently used the Air Force Smart Operations for the 21st Century process to help design fuel conservation initiatives here.

The goal of these initiatives is to help achieve the Secretary of the Air Force's goal to reduce aviation fuel use 10 percent by 2015.

In an analysis of fiscal year 2010 operations, 900,000 pounds of fuel (more than $400,000) was dumped due to significant inefficiencies. An additional $2.3 million was wasted as a penalty for carrying extra fuel on U.S. Air Forces in Europe KC-135 Stratotankers.

"The penalty for carrying extra fuel is five percent for every 1,000 pounds of fuel," said Capt. Gregory Miller, AFSO21 facilitator.

One of the initiatives that came from the four-day AFSO21 event was to implement Air Mobility Command's Air Refueling Liaison Officer program.

"The ARLO program will look significantly different here than the program at AMC," said Capt. Adam Dalson, 100th OG standards and evaluation office. "The scope of this one is a lot smaller, but will be designed to increase the amount of dialogue between us [the 100th OG] and the receiving units."

The ARLO program will also offer optimized tanker consultation and fuel planning training for USAFE receiver units to help calculate more accurate fuel load requirements for a mission.

"Another cause of the inefficiencies is the stuff you can't plan for; receivers and jets break, bad weather happens or missions are scrapped," said Captain Dalson. "We wouldn't find out about these types of things until the night before the flight. The problem is that final fuel loads are being finalized between operations and maintenance at 3 p.m. the day prior to the mission, and a number of things can happen after that."

To fix this on-going problem, the participants at the AFSO21 event created the "just-in-time refueling" sortie initiative.

"In a nutshell, this is an opportunity for us [100th OG and 100th MXG] to identify sorties, the day before that display a high risk level for possible fuel changes," said Captain Dalson. "The 100th OG schedulers will perform a risk assessment on the sortie the day prior. If there seems to be a high chance of possible fuel changes, then they will deem that sortie a JITR."

A JITR sortie requires the aircrew to arrive an hour earlier than the normal show time to provide maintenance a final, more accurate, fuel load. Maintenance will begin to fuel the aircraft four-and-a-half hours before takeoff, ensuring the right amount of fuel is loaded to complete the mission.

"The team [from the AFSO21 event] deemed that 10 to 12 JITR sorties will accurately test the effectiveness of this process," said Captain Miller. "At the moment we are still in the prep work stage, hopefully in the next month or so, we'll have test data."

In the interim, the 100th OG released a memorandum to aircrews stating that all 100th Air Refueling Wing missions will be fuel planned to the nearest 1,000 pounds. In the past, KC-135 fuel loads were rounded to the nearest 5,000 pound increment to be in compliance with technical order standards.

These more stringent requirements may prove to also help reduce fuel consumption costs.