Sustainment & Fabrication — Keep Aircraft Flying When the Supply System Cannot

Sustainment is a combat capability

Small unmanned aircraft are procured like equipment and supported like consumables. When one is damaged, parts may be weeks out, and the capability sits in a case until they arrive. Policy now encourages units to build and train with cheap compliant aircraft. What most units lack is not the printer. It is a documented method and a compliance file that stands up to their own contracting officer and safety officer.

The build-and-sustain track

Aircraft construction from components, soldering and electronics, calibration and tuning, field repair and battle-damage assessment, expedient and additively manufactured platforms, and field battery management, each with a graded gate. The module that saves the most aircraft is battery discipline, so it is taught first.

Fabrication module

A short indoor module, no airspace required, that teaches Soldiers to design, print, assemble, bench-test and document a compliant training airframe, including what the critical-component rules actually restrict and how to source and screen parts. You keep the bill of materials, the compliance reference and the return-to-service record format.

Fabrication program certification

For cadre: builds the standing programme rather than the airframe, so the capability survives the people who learned it and the paperwork holds when a property book officer or a safety officer asks who released the aircraft. Your cadre leave certified to run build, repair and return-to-service without us.

Compliance line

Unit-built and expedient aircraft are training and attritable-role aircraft only. They are not substitutes for program-of-record aircraft on operational missions unless a competent authority says otherwise in writing. For compliant aircraft sourcing see custom builds and Blue UAS.

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