Interview

Fortunately, the RAAF appears to have been thinking along similar lines. Several initiatives being driven by the offices of the Deputy Chief of Air Force (DCAF), Air Vice Marshal (AVM) John Blackburn, and the Director General Personnel – Air Force (DGPERSAF), Air Commodore (AIRCDRE) John Hewitson, are starting to emerge; initiatives which are not only designed to arrest the pilot wastage Air Force is currently experiencing, but which will also ‘re-engineer’ the entire workforce to meet the challenges of the coming decades.

The gestation of many of these looming initiatives can be traced back to 1999 when then Chief of Air Force (CAF) AIRMSHL Errol McCormack initiated a series of reforms across the RAAF which have become the foundations for the latest round of initiatives guided by the current CAF, AIRMSHL Geoff Shepherd.

“When Errol McCormack was here we started the culture change for Air Force,” AVM Blackburn told Australian Aviation in amid January interview. “We did this because we saw we were inhibited in making the changes we needed to do by our culture and our traditions. We were very hierarchical, and if you weren’t a pilot or aircrew, you were basically looked down upon. So we started to proactively adapt our culture so that within a decade, we would be able to start to do some of the major changes we knew we had to do. The program worked very well at senior levels, but had mixed success at the middle levels, so we’re still working that.

“We’ve all got these cards on our ID lanyards which have our values written on them, but it’s not only what’s written on them that is important; it’s what we did to derive them. We had 12 or so Air Commodores who went out and spoke to groups of 20 or so cross-ranked members. We spent five or six months talking to all of our people across all ranks about what’s important to them, why are they in the organisation and what it means to them, so the card is a lot more than just a nice three paragraph buzz statement. It’s something we all did together, not just from the top down by saying ‘we’re senior management; here are your values’. ”

Re-balance

Last year and with ongoing operations continuing at a consistently high tempo, the RAAF embarked on the first of two major change programs to prepare it for the years ahead. “We’re going through a program at the moment in Air Force called re-balance and reshape,” AVM Blackburn explained. “We’re at the highest operational tempo we’ve had for a very long time – one that has been sustained for a while. For example, we’ve got guys in the maritime and airlift worlds going back

“We were very hierarchical, and if you weren’t a pilot or aircrew, you were basically looked down upon. So we started to proactively adapt our culture. . . ”

”now for their fourth or fifth deployment, so that wears a bit thin after a time.

“So, we addressed this higher operational tempo by moving people around the organisation, to ‘re-balance’ it, to make sure the highest priority areas, maritime and airlift, had adequate people to keep them running.

“When our FEGs (Force Elements Groups) were initially designed as organisations, they weren’t designed to have permanent deployments – in those days we thought we’d deploy for about six months at a time, and then come back and rest and reconstitute.

But since 1999, that hasn’t been the case. So the 170 or so people we moved around the system last year to re-balance the system were effectively borrowed out of other areas in Air Force including some of the project offices. ” “There were lots of ‘techos’, some ops people, logistics, and administrative support people,” said AIRCDRE Hewitson. “In as many cases as possible we tried to prevent geographic shifts – it was more about adding people from other parts of the bases or from projects, so you didn’t have a FEG or a wing operating at a size which was quite clearly unsustainable for extended deployments. We had to make sure that we minimised the risk to operations, and we could make those two areas that were under strain sustainable. ” But with operations continuing and a raft of new projects and acquisitions coming on line, Air Force is clearly going to need a boost in personnel numbers in order to just maintain current capability levels, let alone keep pace with the increased capabilities that will come with the new equipment.

A quick snapshot of the new capabilities to come on line between now and 2015 sees at least seven new aircraft types including Super Hornet, Wedgetail AEW&C, KC-30B tanker transport, the Caribou replacement, the F‑35A JSF, the P-8A maritime/reconnaissance aircraft and surveillance UAVs to replace the Orion force. On top of this are further upgrades to the current Hornet fleet, the possibility of additional C-130Js to replace the tiring C-130Hs, and the new Vigilare command and control system. It’s an exciting but exhaustive list! “When you look at the picture of Air Force as of right now, we’ve got about 13,500 people in the organisation,” said AVM Blackburn. “But of that total, about 200 are on maternity leave or long service leave. Then we have about 1480 under training at any one time, plus we’ve got 1500 trainers. Then there are another 900 Air Force people in the DMO, and about 860 in DSG (Defence Support Group). So the actual number of people you’ve got that you can actually use isonly about 8500. ” “What was never properly understood, say 10 years ago when we were used to only bringing in a couple of new capabilities per decade, was that with this incredible range of projects and new capabilities coming, we’re going to have a significant amount of overlap.

For example, we found that when we upgraded the P-3s in the late ’90s, we saw a problem area in the resources to deal with the upgrade and to maintain operational readiness, but a decision had been made prior to that to just absorb that within the organisation. But when you look at the next decade, we realise we’ve got a potentially big problem here.

“While we’ve got this fantastic level of re-investment which is great news, when you look at it more closely, none of the transition costs have really been resourced. Each project has to have a transition team, not just in DMO but also in Air Force, so we’ll have project teams and transition teams, while at the same time we’ve got to keep the old systems going. That scale of change and transition in the next decade really is unprecedented. ” “There are transition models to look at how you would normally do this,” added AIRCDRE Hewitson. “The way air forces traditionally do this is they accept a capability drop during the transition by not adding any resources, but there has been a recognition that this is a very high risk approach, especially when you’re as small as us. So we will really need to manage the transition much better than we have done in the past, and we’ll basically do that by throwing people at it. ”

Recruitment

“We went out and did an analysis that was completed early last year to see what it would While we’ve got this fantastic level of re-investment . . . That scale of change and transition in the next decade really is unprecedented. ”

take to continue to do the job that we are doing today and at the same time manage the transition, and we determined we would need almost 1900 more people on top of the 13,500 we currently have,” AVM Blackburn explained.

“That analysis told us a couple of things – that we currently have a strain problem, and that the transition over the next few years is going to be an extra load. Then, on top of all that, when we get up the back end of the transition in a decade or so, we’ll have all these fantastic capabilities, but the crewing ratios we are currently running will be totally inappropriate. We currently run a Hercules at about 1. 7 crews per aircraft, whereas the US for example runs its C‑17s at five or six crews. While we’re not going to go as high as the US, in order to deliver to government the potential these new capabilities will bring, we’re going to need to run at around three to one.

“There’s already going to be an increased demand on people, but during the transition mode we’re also going to be ‘growing’ our pilot numbers at the same time. Today we’ve got to grow 42 pilots a year just to meet our departure rates, but we’ve struggled to do that recently in part because of PC-9 availability.

Now our calculations moving forward tell us we will need 65 pilots a year to be produced to meet just Air Force’s needs, while Navy will need 10 or 12 a year. Plus with all the modern platforms coming though for Army, they’re also going to need to increase their throughput markedly to around 40 or 50 a year.

“So we now have to not only load up the pilot training system to go from 55 odd to 125 pilots a year as we go to a modern defence force with a higher capability, but it’s also the air base, the ATC, the maintenance support – it’s the whole infrastructure that will require additional resources. ” “While we’re currently at 13,500, we’ve put budget cases together to go to 14,200 and we should be able to get approval to get there. But what we’ve calculated is with this transitional load and the eventual crew ratios; we’ll need to get to just under 15,000 using the current model. But the problem is we don’t want to grow the Air Force at more than 200 people a year.

“To put it into context, a few years ago when we came down from a force size of around 25,000, we dropped a bit below our desired levels. Then three or four years ago, we were about to exceed our authorised manning level so we had to turn some of our recruiting system off. Then about a year later we had to turn it back on again. So what happened was we got into an over-correction cycle which created a bit of a hole in experience and of that age group that’s now following through. So we’re going to try to minimise that by changing the way we work, by re-engineering how we do the job. ” “The workforce, as with any workforce if you internally train, has a certain absorption rate,” AIRCDRE Hewitson said. “You have to maintain your experience profiles, otherwise if you end up with too many inexperienced people at the lower levels, you have to put too many resources in to supervising them, particularly in a high risk area such as aviation. So the trick is to maintain the Air Force’s workforce experience profile so it just marches along happily. Although at the moment we could recruit and in fact train at levels far higher than we have been doing, we have imposed this on ourselves sowe have a measured growth of trained force of 200 per year. ” “Let’s say we did ramp up to 400 a year; you may find you suddenly run head-on into the authorised funding level which forces you to suddenly turn it off, but then you find you need to turn it on again a year later, and so you get into an over-correction cycle again,” AVM Blackburn continued. “So what we have to do is to pick a steady line and argue a couple of years out about the level we have to take the number of people to. ”

Re-engineering

“So between the ideal number of 200 a year and a vector to get us to where we should ideally be, there’s going to be an area we can’t fix. This can only be addressed by two ways – by redesigning it, and by re-engineering it.

“What do we mean by re-engineering? For example, we had a case in one of the squadrons where they were having problems getting a serviceability rate above 50 per cent – they were blaming the contractor plus there were other problems. But over a period of 12 months, they left their 50 per cent serviceability rate behind and took it to 85 per cent sustained, just because they had a very serious look at the way they did the job. They asked themselves whether they were being effective and efficient in their work practices, in how they were managing, in the production management of aircraft, and things such as that.

“I’ve had a team start looking at how we re-engineer the way we do business, not just in the squadrons – we’ve got to look at everything we do. Can we take that cost overhead out, because the government could give us $100 million tomorrow but that won’t fix this problem because we don’t have the people. We can buy equipment, but you can’t buy the right experienced, trained and integrated team. This is something where, for once we say, ‘don’t throw money at us, we’ve got to do this to ourselves. ’ “So lesson number one for us will be to never muck around with the input – just set the vector you need and hold it. The intuitive thing is to think we’re short of people and just ramp it up, but then we’d need to take more people from the ops side to support the ramp up in training, which in turn becomes disruptive to ops. Plus, if we’re not careful and we recruit too many, it can be like a python eating a pig – we’ll have this great lump of people we’ve got to get through the organisation.

“We’ve also got to look at the throughput time. I asked the question last year how long does it take from the time you come through the front door to the day you hit an operational qualification, and I was astonished to find that, since I joined the Air Force, that time has doubled. So effectively, our productivity has gone down by half! “It all happened incrementally, but when we looked at the total system we wondered what had happened. So we’ve been looking in the past six months to start to squeeze parts of that down.

There’s a fair bit more we need to do to make it a very smooth transition through. Currently the ROSO for pilot training (Return Of Service Obligation – 10 years of service) doesn’t start until a member graduates. But from that day, then we’ve got the other issues of operational conversion, so we’ve got toThe role of the Deputy Chief of Air Force is a diverse one, one for which John Blackburn has been training for 33 years.

As DCAF, he is responsible for strategy and concept development; capability planning; air and space policy; international engagement; resource management and governance; the coordination between Air Force, government, other defence services, groups and external agencies; airworthiness and safety management; and for managing Air Force Headquarters on behalf of the Chief of Air Force.

AVM Blackburn joined the RAAF in 1975.

After flying Mirages with 77 and 3SQNs, he attended the UK’s Empire Test Pilots School (ETPS) before serving as a test pilot with ARDU.

After a posting in the US from 1982 where he was a member of the then new F/A-18 project team, AVM Blackburn flew the Hornet with 77SQN as a flight commander, executive officer, and from 1994, as the squadron’s commanding officer.

In 1991 he was appointed Deputy Director Airspace Control in Canberra, responsible for overseeing all RAAF fast jet, air defence control and air traffic control programs, and in 1996, he became Officer Commanding 41WG, in charge of all military air traffic, radar and surveillance units.

In 1999 AVM Blackburn became Director General Policy and Plans at AFHQ, before taking on the roles of Director General of Military Strategy in 2001, and in 2002 the Head of Policy Guidance and Analysis Division (HPGA) where he was responsible for the development of ADF strategic policy and the development of the Defence Joint Vision, the Future War Fighting Concept and the Network-Centric Warfare Concept and Roadmap for the ADF.

In 2004 AVM Blackburn was appointed Commander of the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) Integrated Area Defence System (IADS) located in Malaysia, before returning to Canberra to assume his present role as Deputy Chief of Air Force. make that as short as possible. Then when you look at the whole flow-through of how people go through conversions and post graduate qualifications, we need to make sure that, within the ROSO particularly, we’ve got the capability to re-generate ourselves. ” “While we also have quite a good understanding of what motivates people with regards to the tangible things, we are not that good at quantifying and managing the intangible things such as the warrior ethic, the institutionalised stuff,” added AIRCDRE Hewitson.

“We’re now moving to a joint warfighting environment. Our squadron people spend their time in blue, but then they’re asked to go and work in a joint environment with a different culture. The question we need to ask ourselves is, ‘are we preparing them properly for that?’ You can love your life flying aircraft, but if you get posted into Joint Operations Command, you might not like it. But you will probably like it a lot more if you are prepared for it, so I think that’s the other bit we need to understand and encourage. ”

Separation Rates

But while the input rates are being targeted and refined, Air Force also has to be mindful of its separation rates and where that wastage is coming from.

In 2007, the RAAF lost more than twice the number of pilots at a flight lieutenant (FLTLT) and squadron leader (SQNLDR) level than the two previous years combined, a separation rate which is clearly unsustainable.

So a short term incentive was devised in order to try to stem the flow until the re-engineering process takes hold.

“I am particularly concerned with the rate of separation of SQNLDR and FLTLT pilots who have the post graduate qualifications of qualified flying instructor (QFI), operational flying instructor (OFI), test pilot, fighter combat instructor (FCI) or check qualified captain,” Chief of Air Force AIRMSHL Geoff Shepherd wrote in a January 14 memo.

“As a short term measure to address the separation rate of (these) pilots, I am introducing a one-off $30,000 retention bonus in return for an undertaking of a further service of 12 months. ” The CAF’s retention bonus is available only to those SQNLDR and FLTLT pilots who are outside their ROSO on February 1, 2008. “In essence, I want to demonstrate my commitment to you and I ask you to ‘hold the faith’ while we develop the aircrew pay case throughout 2008,” CAF added.

However, while it is still early days, it remains to be seen just how many takers for the retention bonus there will be. One suspects that most pilots out of ROSO have probably already made up their minds whether or not to stay, while others may delay their departure plans by a year and put the $30,000 towards a 737 or A320 type rating before moving on to one of the airlines in 2009.

“Up until September last year we were prepared to see what was happening,” AIRCDRE Hewitson said. “We knew we were doing the sustainability project this year but that wouldn’t have shown a result until the end of this year at the earliest, and eventually it became a matter of judgement and we had to react. What we’re really doing is showing the workforce that we’re watching and doing something about it. ”

“I admit it’s purely reactive, but it sends a message to say that we can see a trend here, we know there’s an issue, but we can’t solve it immediately so here is a statement that we are serious about this,” AVM Blackburn added.

Some of the elements of the new system will include new pay grades, greater recognition of qualifications and skill sets, more flexible working conditions, and better benefits for members and their families. “We’ve got to look at things like pay profiling and differentiation and the work environment to make sure that the package we provide to people at the point where they’re making decisions is there. ” “But you can’t just re-engineer the organisation, which can be very destabilising, without being very cautious about the health of the organisation as a whole,” AIRCDRE Hewitson continued. “While DCAF focuses on his re-engineering teams, he also relies on my team and I to look out for the stability of the force. So we’re bending over backwards to work with our people to have them stay with

“I admit it’s purely reactive, but it sends a message to say that we can see a trend here, we know there’s an issue, but we can’t solve it immediately so here is a statement that we are serious about this. ”

”us. We recognise that if we communicate well enough, we have very smart people working for us, that they will recognise that this is an end state which isn’t just imposed, and that it’s worthwhile staying with us for the ride. ” “The benefit we’ve got here is very different to previous programs,” added AVM Blackburn. “Previously when we were downsizing and trying to save money, it was a very depressing atmosphere. But now we have a magnificent range of capabilities coming into the organisation, and we are growing in numbers. And best of all, we’re doing this to ourselves, no one’s told us we’ve got to do it, we’ve come to our own realisation. I’ve talked about rebalance, reshape and re-engineering, but the bottom line is we’ve got to change how we work or this isn’t going to be effective.

And the motivation there is that we’re going to be far better off operationally as a result.

“And while we don’t have a problem with recruitment, that’s only looking at what comes in the front door. Personnel Branch has got huge tentacles out there for lateral recruitment from overseas, commissioning from within, and re-enlistment – we’re now a lot more willing to take people who have left the organisation back. In the old days, when you resigned, you were basically considered a leper. What we’re saying to people now is, ‘thanks for your service, and if you want to come back, give us a call and in most cases we’d love to have you back. ’ “We’ve also started looking at things like job sharing where a member will spend half a year with an airline, and half a year with us.

The lifestyle mix they end up with is, they’ll eventually get the money out of the airline, but they also get the excitement out of being a part of our team. That’s what we offer, being part of the team; it’s something you can’t measure but is very powerful. ”

Lessons Of The Past

“With this re-engineering process, we don’t want to do what we did with TQM (the Total Quality Management initiative) a decade ago,” AVM Blackburn said. “TQM was basically, ‘here is the mandated process – you’ll all do this, you’ll all do that. ’ It looked, in my view, in quite small areas – it didn’t look at the whole organisation.

“We’re taking a different approach here – we want to send teams into the workplace and ask, ‘how can we help you? We’re not going to mandate what you do – we want to work with you to help you to achieve a greater, more effective and efficient outcome.

How do you get better serviceability? How do you cut down your overheads?” The way Air Force communicates with its people was tested in 2006 and 2007 when the new Air Combat Officer (ACO) category was introduced. “We found that when we came to making some really hard decisions about the ACO category, the ability to discuss that and not resort to some of our tribalism of the past has made a significant difference at the rate at which we can make decisions,” AIRCDRE Hewitson explained.

Air Force created the ACO out of a need which won’t materialise until next decade.

About 60 per cent of the RAAF’s current senior leadership is comprised of navigators, mainly because most pilots leave to go to airlines before achieving star rank. But because navigators are no longer required on most modern aircraft, Air Force estimates that it will only be producing about eight navigators per year by 2015, meaning a smaller pool of numbers from which to draw future leaders of the organisation by the mid 2020s.

“We used non-conventional means to communicate the ACO concept and we’ll need to do it again for this next phase – you can’t just use RAAF News,” said AVM Blackburn in closing. “You’ve got to face to face, pick the dynamic people and accept that you’ve got to let people vent. The biggest problem with this is if you don’t sell it, so our intention is to go out and speak to every WGCDR and every WOFF in the Air Force and tell them that this is to make us operationally effective.

“The future of the Air Force depends on our people working smarter to maximise the operational capability with the available resources. ”

“The future of the Air Force depends on our people working smarter to maximise the operational capability with the available resources. ” ”