A Case Study of Reliability and Maintainability of the F-16 APG-66 Fire Control Radar

摘要

During the development and test phase of weapon system acquisition, program management and design emphasis must be directed to producing a system that achieves reliability and maintainability in the field. Investigated were these development and test efforts and test efforts and the demonstrated operational performance of a mjaor weapon subsystem in the form of a case study analysis of the F-16 fire control radar. Comparisons of predicted, test-demonstrated and operational APG-66 reliability and maintainability parameters constitute the significant portion of the analyses. In addition, the reliability and maintainability programs and selected performance indicators of the APG-66 and APQ-120 are compared in order to examine the results of differing test-program acquisition policies. This thesis effort determined that the APG-66 has not yet attained a constant failure rate indicative of an equipment's useful life. the research also determined that increased efforts in the test function of an acquisition produces significant benefits in operational results. A summary analysis of the entire program found the predictions based upon the critical design review and intermediate level maintainability demonstration to be somewhat optimistic.