Analyzing daily sorties at NAS Kingsville utilizing alternative refueling methods

Training Air Wing TWO (TW-2) is responsible for the intermediate and advanced phases of Undergraduate Jet Pilot Training and provides the US Navy and Marine Corps with newly winged aviators. The objective of this study is to improve daily operations at TW-2 using sortie output and aircraft refuel waiting time as measures of performance. We define a sortie as any flight event attempted on the daily flight schedule to facilitate student training. We create a discrete-event simulation to model daily jet flow and operations at TW-2. We compare current operations with several alternative refueling strategies that incorporate hot pit refueling to minimize the time jets spend on the ground between consecutive sorties. We consider different factors and run a variety of experiments to determine the impact of various fueling strategies on resource utilization rates in an effort to generate more sorties. Our analysis finds that TW-2 can increase daily sortie throughput by an average of 60 sorties by incorporating both hot pit and cold refueling. We recommend using two hot pits to decrease the yearly idle fuel-burn cost by over $342,000 and reclaim a value of $98,422,500 from the annual maintenance contract at TW-2.