Admiral: Corrosion Damage on F/A-18 Hornets ‘Caught Us by Surprise’

The extent of corrosion damage on the U.S. military’s F/A-18 Hornet fleet is requiring more maintenance than expected, an admiral said.

The Navy and Marine Corps are flying the legacy fighter jets longer than planned — 10,000 flight hours, up from 6,000 flight hours — because of delays in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, according to Rear Adm. Michael Manazir, the service’s director of air warfare. As a result, the 1980s-era, twin-engine aircraft is experiencing a high degree of wear and tear, including corrosion.

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COMPOSITE VS METAL

The services had been replacing worn out parts and other components on the F/A-18 as part of a maintenance program to ensure the aircraft could reach a service life of 6,000 flight hours, Manazir said. Extending that engineering effort to yield 10,000 flight hours “would normally be a straightforward task — if it weren’t for the corrosion created by the environments we operate in,” he said.

Complicating the effort was an assumption made by the Navy decades ago that the Hornet, as a composite aircraft, wouldn’t require the same level of corrosion-prevention work as older, mostly metal planes, such as the F-14 Tomcat, A-6 Intruder and the A-7 Corsair II, Manazir said.

“We had not planned on operating the Hornet past 6,000 hours,” he said. “So we did not do the normal corrosion control processes that we used to use on metal airplanes, like the Tomcats, A-6s, A-7s. We understood what corrosion was on metal. The science is different on corrosion on composites.”

http://www.dodbuzz.com/2015/06/05/admiral-corrosion-damage-on-f-18-hornets-caught-us-by-surprise/