Will there be enough Prowlers?

[thedrifter]

Issue Date: November 24, 2003

Will there be enough Prowlers?
Congress worries aging aircraft may fail before they?re replaced

By David Brown
Times staff writer

The planned reduction of flyable EA-6B Prowlers has congressional lawmakers worried, not only about the short-term health of the aging airframes, but also whether the electronic jammer?s replacement will arrive in time.
On Oct. 31, the Navy announced it will pull 24 Prowlers from service by next spring to replace the jets? stress-cracked wings. That temporary reduction, coupled with the grounding of 19 other Prowlers in September, will drop the fleet to 71 mission-capable Prowlers ? 60 percent of the inventory.

The Navy plans to have the 24 planes fixed and back in service by November 2005. In the meantime, the Navy and Marine Corps will redistribute the remaining 71 planes among their carrier- and land-based squadrons. The plan is to keep Prowlers flying until their replacement ? the EA-18G ? enters the fleet in 2009.

Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pa., said he?s concerned funding for the replacement could slip further down the schedule due to lack of money.

?If budgetary pressures delay the EA-18G line, and maintenance pressures cause the Prowlers to be taken from service sooner than 2009, what happens to the essential support jamming mission?? he said in a written statement. ?Congress and [the Defense Department] must be diligent in ensuring a seamless transition from the Prowler to the follow-on support jamming aircraft, or our military will be faced with a capabilities gap that will hamper our ability to obtain and maintain air superiority.?

Now may be the right time to sideline the aircraft, however. When the carrier Nimitz returned home to San Diego on Nov. 5, that left only the carrier Enterprise on deployment ? a relative breather when it comes to operations tempo.

?If there was ever a good time to keep some of those planes on the ground, now is the time,? said Rep. Rick Larsen, R-Wash.

The Navy owns 119 Prowlers. The 24 aircraft waiting to be fixed have not been grounded, said Lt. Cmdr. Danny Hernandez, a Navy spokesman.

Sixteen Prowlers requiring wing replacement go to the repair depot in the next two months, Hernandez said, after which a one-for-one fleet-replacement schedule will continue until the 24 have been repaired in two years. The road-ahead plan is the second step to the earlier grounding of the 19 Prowlers, which was put into effect Sept. 23. Naval aviation officials said those 19 had cracks in their wing-center sections and outer-wing panels and wrote in the message that another 24 were ?less damaged but create unacceptable peacetime operational risk levels.?

?We?re proactively taking steps to manage this problem so we can optimize available aircraft to support joint and naval requirements,? Hernandez said.

In addition to the 24 wing replacements, the Navy plans to disestablish one of its four expeditionary Prowler squadrons.

The fleet of 95 flyable Prowlers is broken down into 36 in carrier squadrons, 15 in four Navy expeditionary squadrons, 18 for the Marine Corps, 18 in the fleet replacement squadron, four for the Naval Reserve and four for testing.

When the fleet drops to 71 aircraft by next spring, the Prowlers will be redistributed: 30 in carrier squadrons, nine in the remaining three Navy expeditionary squadrons, 15 for the Marine Corps, 13 in the fleet replacement squadron, two for the reserves and two for testing.

Carrier air wings still will deploy with four Prowlers per squadron, said Capt. Andy McCawley, force readiness officer for Commander, Naval Air Force.

Hernandez said officials have not decided which Navy expeditionary squadron will be disestablished, or when. When the fleet is back to 95 flyable planes in two years, aircraft that would have gone back to that squadron will be redistributed into the fleet.

The Navy plans to phase out the Prowlers and steadily replace them with the EA-18G, a reconfigured F/A-18F Super Hornet. The plan to introduce EA-18Gs in 2009 remains unchanged, Hernandez said.

Larsen said he?s confident the Prowlers will last until then. ?Based on what I was told [by the Navy], the 71 EA-6Bs are the minimum number of aircraft necessary to have available support for operational commitments,? he said. ?That?s based upon the Navy?s assessment of risk as well as the rate of repair for the Prowlers. Based on that, I?m confident the Prowlers are going to be able to meet their commitments to national security.?

Larsen added that, according to the Navy, the latest the service could introduce the EA-18G is 2011, so there is some breathing room.

Recognizing the critical condition of the U.S. military?s sole tactical radar jammer, Congress this fall approved $85 million in the wartime supplemental bill to replace outer-wing panels and wing-center sections. Each Prowler has a wing-center section extending from both sides of the fuselage to the wing folds. The outer-wing panels ? two per aircraft ? extend from the wing fold to the wingtip.Larsen said keeping Prowlers flying will be vital in the next few years. The aircraft were used heavily in the Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq wars, even as their numbers dwindled.

?The Prowler is a critical go/no-go asset for our Navy,? he said. ?If it doesn?t fly, the jet fighters don?t fly.?

David Brown covers the Navy.

http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/sto...PER-2387498.php


Sempers,

Roger