A U. S. Navy strategy has been generated to develop, integrate and demonstrate diagnostics, prognostics, health monitoring and life management for propulsion and mechanical systems. How this overall strategy has evolved and its current status will be presented. The SH-60 program was initiated as the first proof-of-concept effort to develop, demonstrate, and integrate available and advanced mechanical diagnostic technologies for propulsion and power drive system monitoring. Included in these technologies were various rule and model based analysis techniques that were applied to demonstrate and validate various levels of diagnostic and trending capabilities. Recently there has been increased emphasis on prognostic capabilities. As used in this paper, prognostics is the capability to provide early detection of the precursor and/or incipient fault condition to a component or sub-element failure condition; and to have the technology and means to manage and predict the progression of this fault condition to component failure. The benefit of this prognostic approach is increased safety and significantly reduced supportability costs over the aircraft life cycle; enabling better management of both existing and potential aircraft system faults. This prognostic philosophy, its benefits, and envisioned implementation will be further embellished. These will be discussed and updated with particular attention to recent gear fault detection results and capability demonstrations.
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