Air Force meets fuel efficiency goal several years early

Friday - 3/22/2013, 5:54am EDT

Jared Serbu, DoD reporter, Federal News Radio

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The Air Force long has been by far the federal government's largest consumer of energy, so every marginal improvement in fuel conservation makes a huge difference to the service's bottom line, said Dr. Jamie Morin, the acting Air Force undersecretary.

"In 2012, we consumed $9 billion worth of energy, and about 85 percent of that went to aviation fuel. It's a huge share of our budget: 8 percent of it goes just for gas, and for comparison purposes, it's almost as much as we spend on all of our space activities," Morin told reporters on a conference call.

Dr. Jamie Morin, acting undersecretary of the Air Force


"In 2012, that amount of money would have funded our full flying hour program for all of our active-duty bombers and our attack aircraft. This is real money that we didn't have to spend on fuel," Morin said. "That's especially important given the volatility of the fuel market in recent years. Exposing ourselves to that much volatility is a risk for us."

Borrowing best practices



"We've also benefited enormously from the fact that we have so many airmen in the guard and reserve who, in their day jobs, are commercial pilots, and we can leverage their expertise," Morin said. "We've also looked at our fuel loading on aircraft. Every gallon of fuel you carry into the sky that you don't need for the mission you're flying is additional weight you're carrying in order to get it up there, and additional fuel consumption. So we have done much more precise fuel loading, particularly on our routine cargo channel missions, which, again, is a widespread practice in the commercial aviation industry."

The Air Force freely acknowledged, however, that simply keeping track of the number of gallons of fuel it uses isn't the most accurate way to track the efficiency of its operations. Fuel also can be saved by simply flying fewer missions, something that's also happened since 2006 as the Air Force reduced its number of fighter aircraft across the service.

And this year's sequestration cuts also will cut the Air Force's fuel consumption, though not by choice.

"We're going to have to stand-down squadrons across the Air Force, and so they won't be burning gas. Unfortunately, they also won't be producing military readiness, which is what we really need right now," he said. "That's a case where we're not energy efficient, we're just using less energy because we're doing less stuff for the country. So I think under sequestration we'll actually increase our performance against that old goal, which is why we need to challenge ourselves with a goal that's more oriented around efficiency and output. How many gallons of gas does it take to produce a trained and ready pilot? How many gallons of gas does it take to move a ton of cargo a thousand miles?"

New approach to measuring efficiency





"This is something that's in our face and it's already happening. Since we have to take a year's worth of cuts in seven months, we've had to absolutely stand on the brakes in terms of vital facility investments," he said. "We had to take much deeper reductions in our facilities in order to somewhat protect our flying hours, and we've limited facility sustainment to only emergency work orders. We're seeing about a 90 percent reduction in that area, which means we can't even do very simple things that pay for themselves very quickly, like replacing a building's windows with more energy-efficient ones. Those are all crowded out. We're only dealing with emergency requirements, and that's what our situation will be for the remainder of this fiscal year."



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