Management and Operations Commons^™

Examining The Relationship Between Title 14 Code Of Federal Regulations (Cfr) Part 147 Maintenance School Aviation Maintenance Technician (Amt) Instructor Experience And Instructor Pass Rates For Airmen Certification Standards (Acs) Element Subject Areas, Richard Lyman Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

This quantitative, correlational study examined the relationship between Aviation Maintenance Technician (AMT) instructor experience and student pass rates in 14 CFR Part 147 maintenance schools. Data were collected from February to August 2025 using purposive and snowball sampling, which yielded 67 complete responses. Instructor experience, measured in months of A&P-rated maintenance work prior to teaching, ranged from 1 to 684 months (M = 253.54, SD = 197.97). Student pass rates, defined as the proportion of students passing ACS element subject area courses, ranged from .52 to 1.00 (M = .95, SD = .07). Most instructors were male, White, over 50 …

Representation Learning For Generative Models With Applications To Healthcare, Astronautics, And Aviation, Van Minh Nguyen

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores applications of representation learning and generative models to challenges in healthcare, astronautics, and aviation.

The first part investigates the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to synthesize realistic electronic health record (EHR) data. An initial attempt at training a GAN on the MIMIC-IV dataset encountered stability and convergence issues, motivating a deeper study of 1-Lipschitz regularization techniques for Auxiliary Classifier GANs (AC-GANs). An extensive ablation study on the CIFAR-10 dataset found that Spectral Normalization is key for AC-GAN stability and performance, while Weight Clipping fails to converge without Spectral Normalization. Analysis of the training dynamics provided further …

Examining The Effect Of Contractor Logistics Support On The Reliability Of Military Aircraft, Rodrigo S. Campos De Moura

Theses and Dissertations

This study utilizes survival analysis for examining the effect of Contractor Logistics Support (CLS) on the reliability of military aircraft before and after implementing CLS. The provider of CLS in this study is the original equipment manufacturer that designed and produced the target aircraft of this study, the Embraer A-29 Super Tucano.

Fair Fault-Tolerant Approach For Access Point Failures In Networked Control System Greenhouses, Mohammed Ali Yaslam Ba Humaish

Theses and Dissertations

Greenhouse Networked Control Systems (NCS) are popular applications in modern agriculture due to their ability to monitor and control various environmental factors that can affect crop growth and quality. However, designing and operating a greenhouse in the context of NCS could be challenging due to the need for highly available and cost-efficient systems. This thesis presents a design methodology for greenhouse NCS that addresses these challenges, offering a framework to optimize crop productivity, minimize costs, and improve system availability and reliability. It contributes several innovations to the field of greenhouse NCS design. For example, it recommends using the 2.4GHz frequency …

Protection Of Linear Assets In Arctic Regions Using Basic Expeditionary Airfield Resources (Polaar Bear), Christopher P. Lintz

Theses and Dissertations

In the 2018 United States National Defense Strategy, the Department of Defense mandated that forces are to be more dynamic and decentralized. The Arctic region was a key topic that was addressed. This means that in the future, it is possible that personnel will need to operate in the Arctic, away from the standard built up infrastructure, to enhance the capabilities of the Air Force and enable the power projection required for mission execution. When establishing a new location, water systems are one of the first requirements for setting up a temporary base infrastructure. However, the Air Force’s current expeditionary …

Optimal Scheduling Of Aircraft Test And Evaluation Fleets To Balance Availability For Testing And Training, Sarah E. Hoops

Theses and Dissertations

The 96th Test Wing at Eglin Air Force Base manually schedules a fleet of approximately 26 aircraft to conduct a range of missions over a one-to-two year planning period. This study automates the scheduling process, does so in a manner that optimizes multiple planning goals related to aircraft availability for training, and provides the 96th Test Wing with a software tool for the implementation that can be used by operational analysts within the command. We formulate the scheduling problem as a multiobjective, nonlinear, binary integer math program that seeks to maximize both the lowest percent of time any aircraft is …

Investigating Supply Parts Delivery Delay From Supply Depot To King Khaled Air Base In Royal Saudi Air Force, Rashed S. Alkhathami

Theses and Dissertations

Aircraft supply parts is an important factor in preparing the aircraft to do its mission. Due to delayed delivery of parts or inefficient delivery process, time may be lost waiting for aircraft supply parts, causing mission delay or failure. By tackling the delivery delay causes we can insure improvement on delivery process. In order to gather data for this thesis two different tools were used, aircraft parts data and an interview. Data was gathered from the F15 maintenance and supply squadrons in the Royal Saudi Air Force. Results of this research showed diverting in the main duty of supply depot …

Low-Cost Carriers Versus Legacy Carriers: Passenger Preference During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Aaron Bushelle

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the current study was to identify whether passengers had a preference between traveling on low-cost carriers versus legacy carriers during the ongoing pandemic. Building off research conducted by another researcher, several dimensions were identified and utilized within the question items. For this research, the target population was persons residing within the United States who were at least 18 years old and have traveled since the start of the pandemic in the United States in January 2020. A questionnaire was distributed online, and convenience sampling was undertaken. A T-test was conducted, and results indicated that when it came …

An Investigation Of Runway Risks Using A Systems Approach, Mehnaz Hassan

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore and determine if Causal Analysis Based on System Theory ( could divulge differing underlying causes in the Taxiway overflight incident of Air Canada Flight 759 at San Fran cisco International Airport, as compared to traditional investigation methods used by the National Transportation Safety Board ( Investigations tend to focus on trying to establish the probable cause of an accident or incident, and as a result, the systemic components tend to be overlooked which leads to the common underlying causes of the event left unsolved. Adopting a systems approach to assessing runway risks …

A Simulation Modeling The Effects Of Maintenance Personnel On Aircraft Sortie Generation, Benjamin D. Huffman

Theses and Dissertations

Commanders and wargamers lack adequate tools to quickly determine the number of mission-capable (MC) aircraft and number of achievable sorties to support wargames and exercises. Even less understood is the impact of available maintenance personnel on sortie generation. The Expected-Number-of-In-Game-Mission-capable Aircraft (ENIGMA) simulation was recently developed to calculate the number of MC aircraft and number of sorties own accounting for the number and type of aircraft, scheduled sorties, mean-time-between-failure (MTBF), and mean-time-to-repair (MTTR). ENIGMA is extended by replacing the MTTR input with functions derived from actual numbers and types of maintenance personnel available. Functions in the form of response surface …

Resilient Maintenance Infrastructure: Dynamic Repair Network Designs To Effectively Manage Supply Chain Disruptions, David W. Wallace Iii

Theses and Dissertations

Supply chains are facing numerous changes contributing to their increase in complexity and vulnerability to disruptions. Subsequently, decision-makers lack a transparent, generalizable tool to quantify supply chain resilience and assess additional resilience investments. This research facilitates a more profound understanding of the intricacies and interrelation of supply chain nodes and constructs. It integrates the Area under the Curve (AUC) metric to quantify performance or any organizational measure of competitive advantage amid a disruption. Due to its structural resemblance to various organizational platforms, the subset United States Air Force (USAF) F-16 engine repair and supply network is modeled employing discrete-event simulation. …

The Effects Of Aircraft Use And Available Repar Spares On Aircraft Sortie Generaiton: A Long-Duration Logistical Wargaming Simulationtool, Nathaniel M. Choo

Theses and Dissertations

A long-duration logistical wargame simulation tool that can provide quick insights into the daily aircraft availability and the daily number of missions accomplished for a variety of operational scenarios is developed. This simulation tool is designed to be a stepwise wargaming support tool for adjudication within long-duration logistical wargames and provides the user many capabilities including, but not limited to, the ability to have multiple bases and types of aircraft. Additionally, the user has the ability to control types of part failures, control parts availability, control maintenance capabilities, and control number of mission scheduled. Finally, the user can account for …

Investigation Of An Avionics Part Deficiencies In Royal Saudi Air Force Fleets, Nasser S. Alanazi

Theses and Dissertations

The Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) is experiencing a shortage in certain avionics parts due to a lack of reliability. This issue is causing a supply chain disturbance in the F1-15 fleet and the Hawk fleet. One of the factors behind this problem is the environmental effects in Saudi Arabia .The study will investigate and analyze the methods for the Improvement Cycle Processes and the Quality Management within the RSAF repair cycle. Finding show that, the discrepancies are rising during summer and fall time due to the environment change, Other finding were addressed in the study.

Mc80: Quantifying Effect Of Fleet Health On Sortie Execution In F-16 Fleet, Kyle R. Gladney

Theses and Dissertations

By order of the Secretary of Defense, all of the US Air Force's F-16 units were tasked to improve their fleet health to a Mission Capability (MC) rate of 80 percent, as part of a Department of Defense-wide push to make its Critical Aviation Platforms, and the units that employ them, more ready and lethal. This study uses historical fleet health and sortie execution data captured from LIMS-EV (Weapon System Viewer, 2020) to create a multiple regression model that quantifies the value of increased fleet health, defined as either MC rate or Aircraft Availability (AA) rate, in terms of increasing …

Sortie-Based Aircraft Component Demand Rate To Predict Requirements, Thomas R. O'Neal

Theses and Dissertations

Weapon System Sustainment (WSS) costs are growing at an increasing rate despite the vast efforts to reduce them. Researchers have attributed much of the cost increase to inaccurate demand forecasts for weapon system spare parts. In 2011, the forecast to sustain all United States Air Force (USAF) aircraft was 19% accurate and WSS costs per year have continuously increased. The purpose of this study is to explore a parsimonious change to aircraft component forecasting to reduce costly forecast error. This study substitutes flying hours with sorties for the purpose of demand forecasting. Many F-16 and B-52 spare parts are evaluated …

Resilient Aircraft Sustainment: Quantifying Resilience Through Asset And Capacity Allocation, Zachary B. Shannon

Theses and Dissertations

Decision makers lack a clear, generalizable method to quantify how additional investment in inventory and capacity equates to additional levels of resilience. This research facilitates a deeper understanding of the intricacies and complex interconnectedness of organizational supply chains by monetarily quantifying changes in network resilience. The developed Area under the Curve metric (AUC) is used to quantify the level of demand that each asset allocation can meet during a disruptive event. Due to its applicability across multiple domains, the USAF F-16 repair network in the Pacific theater (PACAF) is modeled utilizing discrete event simulation and used as the illustrating example. …

The Effects Of Funding Gaps On Depot Maintenance Hours, Carlo S. D'Amato

Theses and Dissertations

The relationship between expenditures and readiness level is a topic of interest to military senior leaders, defense resource planners, and the American taxpayer alike. Senior leaders within the Air Force (AF) justify increased defense budgets by pointing to the potential adverse effects that decreased funding could have on military readiness. Resource planners within the AF are then tasked with the responsibility of ensuring that budgets are allocated most effectively to maximize the AF's ability to project airpower across a variety of contingency operations. This thesis investigates the relationship between budgets and readiness by examining the relationship between depot level funding …

Predicting Upper Atmospheric Weather Conditions Utilizing Long-Short Term Memory Neural Networks For Aircraft Fuel Efficiency, Garrett A. Alarcon

Theses and Dissertations

Aviation fuel is a major component of the Air Force (AF) budget, and vital for the core mission of the AF. This study investigated the viability of LSTMs to increase the accuracy of deterministic NWP models, while also investigating the ability to reduce model generation time. Increased forecast accuracy for wind speeds could be implemented into existing flight path models to further increase fuel efficiency, while reduced modeling times would allow flight planners to generate a flight plan in rapid response situations. The most viable model consisted of an ensemble of six LSTMs trained o six coordinates. The model's error …

Quantifying The Effects Of Aircraft Engine Upgrades On Operating And Support Costs, Bradford A. Myers

Theses and Dissertations

As research into Operating and Support (O and S) costs matures, the focus can narrow. This research represents a first of its kind for the Air Force; it is an empirical study to analyze the effects of new engines on fuel efficiency and maintenance over those engines they replace. Within this research, new engines are those with distinct Type Series Modification (TMS) designators that appear within categories of Mission Designation System (MDS) aircraft. The only new engines appear on C-5s, C-130s, and C-135s. The inclusion of retired engines brings in two fighter aircraft, F-15s and F-16s. The data source is …

Hybrid Tri-Objective Optimization Of F-15 Fleet Modernization Scheduling, Richard S. Danaher

Theses and Dissertations

The F-15 weapons system is vital to the Air Forces efforts to obtain air supremacy during conflict. Originally produced almost 50 years ago, technological advancement through systems modifications is necessary to ensure the Eagles lethality and survivability against next-generation adversarial threats. The F-15 Systems Program Office faces challenges to plan aircraft inductions for five fleet modernization programs. Optimal induction schedules are developed using binary-integer linear programming models. Diverse constraints such as manpower, equipment, modification kit availability, minimum operational flight levels, and integration of scheduled depot maintenance reveal that no feasible schedule exists. Two competing objectives representing the value of fully …

Inherent Jeopardy Of Performance Based Contracting Metrics: A Simulation Experiment, Daniel Cherobini

Theses and Dissertations

There is a growing trend across the world to adopt Performance Based Contracting strategies to support logistics systems. Using these policies, contract payments are strongly related to the performance achieved compared to prespecified metrics. However, managers are not always confident on what are the most suitable performance goals to use in these agreements. As a consequence, contractors struggle to deliver the desired performance results, while aircraft fleets experience an increase in support costs. And when the results are inadequate, leaders are tempted to impose even more performance targets to contractors, willing to exercise more control over the support organization. In …

Optimization Of Airfield Parking And Fuel Asset Dispersal To Maximize Survivability And Mission Capability Level, Ryley R. H. Paquette

Theses and Dissertations

While the US focus for the majority of the past two decades has been on combatting insurgency and promoting stability in Southwest Asia, strategic focus is beginning to shift toward concerns of conflict with a near-peer state. Such conflict brings with it the risk of ballistic missile attack on air bases. With 26 conflicts worldwide in the past 100 years including attacks on air bases, new doctrine and modeling capacity are needed to enable the Department of Defense to continue use of vulnerable bases during conflict involving ballistic missiles. Several models have been developed to date for Air Force strategic …

Exploratory Analysis Of The Potential Use Of Augmented Reality In Aircraft Maintenance, Richard B. Keesling

Theses and Dissertations

During the last decade manpower constraints and an aging fleet, along with sustained war time operating tempo, have combined to place a significant strain on the Air Force maintenance community. Recent technological advances have enabled Immersive Technology to be applied to industrial applications in the commercial sector. This has sparked interest within the Air Force and generated various initiatives seeking to enhance readiness through the application of Immersive Technology. This research explores how Immersive Technology can be applied within the maintenance community. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to determine where the maintenance community shortfalls exist, if the available technology has the …

Assessing Artificial Agent Response Time Effects On Human-Agent Teams In Variable Inter-Arrival Time Environments, David J. Canzonetta

Theses and Dissertations

Autonomous systems have gained an expanded presence within the Department of Defense (DoD). Furthermore, the DoD has clearly stated autonomous systems must extend the capabilities of their human operators. Thus, the exploration of strategies for effective pairing of humans and automation supports this vision. Previous research demonstrated that the time at which an automated agent assumes a task for its human teammate, or agent response time (ART), affects human-agent team performance, human engagement, and human workload. However, in this research environment, the time between subsequent tasks appearing to the human-agent team, or inter-arrival time (IAT), remained constant. Variable IAT environments …

Product Development Process For Small Unmanned Aerial Systems, Jonathan D. Poole

Theses and Dissertations

The DoD has recognized the need for persistent Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) over the last two decades. Recent developments with commercial drones have changed the market structure; there is now a thriving and extensive market base for drone based remote sensing. This research provides system engineering methods to support the DoD use of this burgeoning market to meet operational ISR needs. The three contributions of this research are: a process to support Small Unmanned Aerial Systems (SUAS) design, tools to support the design process, and tools to support risk assessment and reduction for both design and operations. The process …

United States Air Force Applications Of Unmanned Aerial Systems (Uas): A Delphi Study To Examine Current And Future Uas Autonomous Mission Capabilities, Alberto Sigala

Theses and Dissertations

As UAS technology continues to grow and enable increased autonomous capabilities, acquisition and operational decision makers must determine paths to pursue for existing and emerging mission areas. The DoD has published a number of 25-year unmanned systems integration roadmaps (USIR) to describe future capabilities and challenges. However, these roadmaps have lacked distinguishable stakeholder perspectives. Following the USIRs concept, this research focused on UAS autonomy through the lens of UAS subject matter experts (SMEs). We used the Delphi method with SMEs from USAF communities performing day-to-day operations, acquisitions, and research in UAS domains to forecast mission capabilities over the next 20 …

Evaluation Of Rsaf Airworthiness And Applicability, Majed M. Altowairqi

Theses and Dissertations

This research focuses on evaluation of Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF) airworthiness processes and their applicability. The current RSAF airworthiness process is in accordance with internationally recognized best practice in the area of military aviation, this is achieved by benchmarking against European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standards. Airworthiness policy for the RSAF is developed on the basis that it will be as civil as possible and as military as necessary. For the purpose of this research, the current RSAF airworthiness process will be benchmarked against the United States Air Force (USAF) airworthiness process. That …

Flightline Simulation Model Of A Squadron, Huseyin Mert

Theses and Dissertations

Military flight training is a long and costly process. Ensuring that the training aircraft are ready for flight is critical in processing pilots through training courses on schedule. Maintaining a high mission capable rate for training aircraft requires scheduled periodic maintenance and maintenance between sorties. Aircraft Ground Equipment (AGE) is used to service each aircraft to make it ready for the following flight. Having a sufficient amount of AGE available is critical, as cancelling or delaying sorties due to lack of AGE generally has a significant impact on the training schedule. This work analyzes the AGE support equipment used in …

Assessment Of The Evolving Low-Cost Business Model For The Future Importance Of U.S. Secondary Airports, Nurettin Dinler

Theses and Dissertations

Airline deregulation caused a profound reshape in the aviation industry. The liberalization of the aviation sector resulted in a favorable environment for the emergence of low-cost carriers (LCCs). Following deregulation, airlines saw many attempts at their business strategies to gain more passengers in air transportation market. To capture additional market shares of passenger traffic, the business models of LCCs have evolved to mirror the more common business models employed by the traditional legacy airlines. The purpose of this study was to examine what effect, if any, exists between LCCs’ market share of passenger enplanements at secondary airports and their business …

Managing Supply Discrepancies: The Effect Of Performance Measurement And Feedback On Order Fulfillment Quality, Michael J. Weber

Theses and Dissertations

Extensive research on the impact of shipping and packaging errors in the private sector finds numerous negative outcomes, including reduced customer satisfaction, reduced customer loyalty, and lower profitability. However, little research has been done examining the impact of order fulfillment errors on military operations. The purpose of this research is to quantify the impact of supply discrepancy reports (SDRs) on military aircraft readiness metrics, including cannibalizations, not mission capable supply (NMCS) hours, aircraft availability and MICAP hours. Results show SDRs significantly impact aircraft readiness metrics in seven of the fifteen analyses conducted. Additionally, a quasi-experimental study is implemented at DLA …