 Well, hello and welcome everybody to this Freeman Air and Space Institute online event. It's really good to be here. And for those of you who don't know me, my name is Sophie Antrobus. I'm a research fellow here at the Institute. And our event today is on how to create an optimized Air Force. Some of you will know that the Royal Air Force led the establishment of the Global Air Force's climate change collaboration. In fact, the launch event took place at King's hosted by Freeman about two and a half years ago now. It's a collaboration of the world's Air Forces to share ideas and best practice on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and operating more efficiently as fighting forces. The initiatives continue to develop with working groups led by countries from around the globe and more than 40 Air Forces are participating. So I'm delighted to be joined by Roberto Guerrero, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Air Force for operational energy, whose team are doing some really fascinating work, which was what we're going to learn about today. I know the slides include some contact information for his organization at the end, and we'll also be putting that in the chat. For those of you who are joining us for the first time, welcome from the Freeman or two and from the Freeman Air and Space Institute. We hold regular events online and in person on all aspects of Air and Space Power. You can also join our mailing list from the front page of our website and there'll be some details in the chat function as well there. And if you haven't done so, you can also have a look at some of our recent publications, most recently on one on space dependence, one on space deterrence by denial. And even one by myself on an applied history of the RS appetite to risk because there's always time for a bit of self admiration isn't there. Do keep an eye on our socials about future events that were on LinkedIn and X slash Twitter. And so we hope to see you again at future events. This event will be recorded and we will be putting putting that out on our YouTube. At some point in the future, it normally takes a few days for that to take place. So in terms of format today, but as he's kindly asked me to address him will speak for around 20 minutes, and then we'll turn to Q&A. So please use the Q&A function you start putting questions in as soon as you want. I'm sure you're all used to this and we've been doing this for some time. Anyway, to introduce Roberto Guerrero. He's responsible for providing oversight and direction for all matters pertaining to the formulation review and execution of plans policies and programs for the effective and efficient use of the US Air Force is $5 billion. Amazing figure operational energy bill in support of its global mission. He first joined the Navy as an aviator in the late 1980s and then transfer transferred to the United States Air Force in 2000. He qualified on the E3 AWACS and held assignments in Oklahoma and Okinawa, Japan, where he commanded the 961st Airborne Air Control Squadron. He later served at the Air Force Safety Center as a division chief and concluded his career in the military as the center's vice commander. And during his military service, he served many operations across the globe through 24 combat missions over Afghanistan during operation, enduring freedom. And as a command pilot, he has more than 4,100 flight hours under his belt, including 350 combat hours. In the next phase of his career, he joined the civil service, serving as Deputy Chief of Safety for the US Air Force and Executive Director Air Force Safety Center in New Mexico. During that tour of duty, he was Director of Staff Headquarters Air Force Reserve Command in Georgia. So impressive CV with both the combat experience and a lot of safety experience, which is my area of interest at the moment. I'll hand over now to Bert for about 20 minutes. And as I say, after that we'll have good length of time for some Q&A. So please do put your questions in the box over to you. Thank you very much, Dr. Andrew Buzz, to you, to the Freeman Air and Space Institute for allowing us to talk about things that we're working on. We really feel strongly that sharing ideas of optimizing aviation will make us all stronger in the end. I'm going to ask my Exec Lieutenant Ramos to go ahead and share the slides please. Okay. So, as Sophie mentioned, you know, I was a career aviator actually had an aeronautical engineering degree in college and at some point I think I saw a top gun one and decided I wanted to be an operator initially and did that for 23 years. And, you know, as she mentioned, I concluded my career at the Air Force Safety Center and I think that goes to a lot of what our strategy is with respect to how do you optimize aviation because from a safety perspective you look at how to optimize safety. Obviously, you know, combat capability is key to safety. You know, the safest thing you can do is just not fly, right, but you're not going to be combat capable. So, we would look at processes as well as technologies to operate our aircraft more safely, operate our vehicles more safely. You know, I think a lot breaks and seatbelts and airbags, those are all for the occupant to either drive safer or to protect them in the crash. And the flip side is, is that you have to do drive training too. Right. So for us, we think a lot about, you know, the process as well as the technologies that will get us to optimize the execution of our mission. Excuse me. Next slide. And so just a kind of an overview of our mission and vision. You know, the bottom line is, is that we're a Department of Defense, the United States Department of Defense entity, you know, and for the taxpayer, we are looking to optimize and increase combat capability and mitigate operational risk through energy and foreign solutions and technologies. And, you know, in the long run, we're looking to have an energy optimized Air Force that that maximizes our lethality per gallon. And we do that in five different ways. Fuel more fight talks about the improvement of an energy intensity of operations. That's really that squeezing that much more mission out of every drop of gas or energy, you know, whatever energy you might be using. No fuel no fight is really key to us, especially in the Pacific of understanding the fuel logistics supply chain. We fought in theaters of recent that are not challenged from logistics perspective, at least on the aviation side but you know some of our emphasis in the Department of Defense, with respect to operational energy really goes back to what ground forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007-2008 timeframe, where that fuel and water logistics supply chain was really threatened and about a third of our casualties at that time in those theaters were because we were delivering fuel and water and other logistics across threatened pathways to forward operating bases that really did not have the right and optimize equipment so generators that were maybe under a 10% load and no real good water recycling processes and whatnot. And so the Department of Defense started looking at that and then directed all the services to do the same thing and that's where we have really taken off since about 2010 when my office was stood up and I got here 2014. We really tried to look at, you know what the demand is at the tip of the spear and what equipment we were providing and how can we optimize that equipment, what are the processes that we're using and how can we optimize those processes. Goal number three, Accelerate to Win. We really saw, and we'll talk about this in the future and I use this example of why my office exists, but we really saw some, you know, to be frank, 19th century, 1800s, 19th century solutions for executing our mission. We were doing, you know, complex schedules in an LED air base on a with dry race markers and magnets, really nothing more than a glorified chalkboard. And that's really not the way we can optimize the way we execute our mission. And obviously, you know, the commercial industry may risk and other logistics companies would never do something like that. So, so we spent some time trying to optimize those types of processes. In the data form decisions, we also saw that we really weren't collecting the data off of our aircraft and being a safety guy and knowing that flight data reporters have a wealth of knowledge that will help us operate more safely. They will also help us operate more efficiently and track those, let's say drag reduction or let's say power plant improvements that we've been doing to make sure that they're actually giving us the type of effect that we want. And then engage in informed stakeholders. This is part of it, building an OE culture throughout, you know, our allies and partners, as well as within the Air Force, and determining ways to incentivize the more optimum execution of our mission. Next slide, please. So just just as a start off, you know, one of the bigger projects we're working on is this thing called the blending wing body. We have been flight following this particular technology since about 2010. NASA and Boeing and before that McDonald Douglas, we're looking at how do we develop more optimum airframes, you know, a tube and wing design, the tube itself is really easy to pressurize. That's why you see cylindrical pressure vessels throughout, you know, most pressure type of applications. But for us, that tube really doesn't help you with respect to lift. It just creates drag. And so the idea behind the blending wing body, and it's not. You may look at it and say it looks like a flying wing, but it's really not a flying wing because the idea is that that whole internal area is is pressurized. And it really expands the amount of storage that you can have on the order of. 4,000 miles, you could probably over fuel about seven at 35 as compared to one right now with our KC 46 or KC 135. And, you know, the same type of applications in cargo can ensure that we have much greater reach and combat capability in the theaters that will be challenged such like in the Pacific. So we're in the process of doing this public private partnership because the airlines are also interested in having something that can carry a lot more passengers with a lot lower fuel burn. We think on the order of just aerodynamics alone about 30% increase in efficiency and that's big for the airlines because they spend a lot of money gas. This public private partnership might be, you know, the project itself is kind of similar to the 707 only 707 development, which was really started by the dash 80, which was the precursor to the Air Force buying aerial tankers, the KC 135 Alpha models. And then the commercial airlines like one trip and pan am buying 707s. We want to get something airborne demonstrate capabilities and we think that will result in a big demand and it provides us competition. That right now doesn't really exist with a duopoly of large aircraft manufacturers being Boeing and Airbus so we'd like to see more competition and this is one way to do it and we've done this in similar applications in the Air Force like agility prime where we put a little bit of money in. And we've developed several companies, Joby beta archer that are trying to expand urban air mobility. Next slide please. Part of what we discovered is that crews themselves, like the way where our finances are structured the way our Air Force pays for fuel is that it's a centralized account that centralized account tells wing commanders and squadron commanders like me, just fly out your flying our program and we'll pay the gas bill. Well, we realized when we started looking at locations like in the 52 and the C 17 the C five that sometimes operations and maintenance would agree upon a ramp load that would ensure that any time any crew needs to go to any aircraft they can conduct their mission but it really wasn't efficient. We were carrying a lot of extra fuel and in some cases that carrying of extra fuel that you weren't going to burn was resulting in additional maintenance because the aircraft were heavier, you were replacing your tires and your brakes and your struts. As a matter of fact, in the B 52 community we calculated per year about a 7000 maintenance man hours addition just to replace parts that were breaking down because they were landing so heavy or so much heavier than they really needed to be on the order of about 30,000 pounds heavier than they need to be. So we started this program and part of it is is that wing commanders and squadron commanders now benefit from, you know, the savings in other words we go back and say look like you look at these best practices that we've already developed through our research of the way you to see five missions and it's helpful to have pilots and air crew on our staff as well as they're not like engineers to be able to to show the validity of these procedures and some of these pilots are reservists so which means that they work for us part time and they work for the airlines part time so they see what the airlines are doing and they're trying to bring some of that efficiency and effectiveness back to the Air Force. The key with the with this mission execution excellence program is that they're in the past wasn't it and set in for wing commanders and squadron commanders to ask their crews to look differently at the way they execute the mission. Now they are we give them a certain percentage back from the savings that we approve for that year. And then the rest of it goes back in the other mission priorities, instead of being burnt out the tailpipes of our aircraft that money is actually used towards something tangible. And the money that we're giving to the wings they have the ability to use it for crew enhancements for equipment maintenance enhancement for equipment, or other things that are just quality of life that in the past they haven't had the money for. Like I'll tell you that most wing commanders in the Air Force like a base somewhere that wing commander has maybe $25,000 a year for discretionary funds to do what he wants to do the rest of it's pretty much tied up so when we came to them and said hey we'll give you somewhere above $250,000 per year if you participate in this program because we think that's the amount of savings that we'll realize the they adopted instantly and you can see we went from one location or excuse me a couple locations and saving about a million gallons. In the first year to about 4 million gallons in the second year, and that was way more than we were actually getting at the words but it was something that they were enthusiastic so this idea behind and I'll talk about a little bit more but this idea behind providing an incentive is really we think effective in getting crews and their leadership to say, yep, I'll do it a little differently because it results in me getting something in return that will help me either execute the mission or make my quality of life better. Next slide please. So we're also doing some work just on looking at technologies in aerodynamics that in the past we've tested. But again, it was, it was difficult to translate those savings that we would receive in fuel back to the, to the, the sustainment folks who were working on it's up when you, when you approach an organization and say hey I know you're having trouble keeping your aircraft airborne because of various different maintenance actions but we'd like to add one more thing to complicate your life. And that's going to save us fuel and and we'll talk about how I get that money back to you really want to focus in on initially really easy efforts that are very low cost that are that are almost invisible to maintenance folks. And that's why we started with micro vanes C 17s and the C 130s really are pretty good candidates for this program and really what it does much like, you know, winglets reduce vortices off the wing tip, especially those aircraft that have a large ramp and a large upsweep on the tail. They, they create a lot of aft body vortices that these help mitigate. And so in this case you can see a very very small cost for us on the order of we think about three to $6 million per year, or excuse me, one time three to six million six million dollars for one time cost to to retrofit all of our 222 C 17s which, you know, is, you know, roughly about I'm trying to think what the number was six to 10 million per aircraft plus maintenance costs and that, so very very low cost for the entire fleet. And we'll return it back in fuel savings within the first year. And I'll tell you that that $5 billion, you know, little ones and 2% off that $5 billion turns out to be a pretty big number. And actually our numbers have gone up a little bit because the cost of price or closer to $7 billion, but the, but the fuel burn of a small airline like Southwest Airlines here in the United States, but half of what America and United Burn per year, but it's still a big number and repurposing that money back to mission has really been a lot of our success. So in this case, about a 1% change in the C 130. We've already seen some airlines adopting this in the United States where they realize that 1% for them, and especially the low cost of implementation has, as you know, attracted them to implementing this technology. Next slide. Similarly, we were looking at this type of application on the C 130 aircraft and there's a company called micro town in Australia that has this. It's basically tape application. It's a large, you know, an earble applique on certain areas of the aircraft and those really microscopic riblets, you know, very, very small changes to surface the aircraft are also drag reduction and enhancing. And so we're going to go down the path over the next year to do what we're doing in the C 17 right now, which is we're flying 10 aircraft for serviceability, just to make sure that nothing causes these micro rains to come off the aircraft, or, you know, just for damage, tolerance and whatnot. We're going to do that eight aircraft, eight US aircraft to Canadian aircraft. We're going to do that serviceability over the next year. While in the C 130, we're actually going to do the flight testing that we just finished with the C 17 on these technologies and looking to do serviceability testing after that. I'll note that in the C 130 is a commercial variant of the C 130 that this company called linen air cargo that operates in Alaska and other cold environments. They've been using this micro rain solution that the Air Force tested 10 years ago they've been using it for the past six or seven years they've accumulated about 25,000 hours on their 10 aircraft have never had any issues have never had one of these things come off. They've kind of forgotten about it, but they, other than the fact that they know it gets them about 3% per year in fuel savings and the US Coast Guard did the same thing, also saw about 3% fuel savings. And so we think this is a pretty good application going forward. Next slide. But similarly, you know, we looked at how we wash engines, and how we coat engine blades, and we found pretty good success, especially in the, in the CV 22. We've tried auditing how they wash their engines we discovered that there was some issues with the method that had been provided by the odm. equipment manufacturer on how to wash those engines because they were just washing the hot section of the engine, they weren't washing the whole engine is we all know, you know, in certain environments, the whole section of the engine is going to get contaminates that pressure blades and turbine blades and so if you can figure out a way to wash the whole engine, as opposed to just the hot section. What advantage would that give to you, you know, washing the hot section on CD 22 was difficult because they would have it in this, you know, props up configuration and then they would actually have to take off cowlings and insert to two hoses that squirted detergent into the hot section on on each engine, and that whole cowling removal process was really onerous. And this company came to us and said we have this way to squirt water that has a little bit of turgine in it but if you mix it with enough compressed air it'll expand. And the big question was well does it expand enough to get to the entire engine because really want to watch the hot section. And the first couple of tests they opened up the ports for the hot section and the phones that this thing was bringing in the front of the aircraft were coming out that so they were like, yep, it's working, it's getting the whole engine. And then let's take a look at what it does. And we saw not only an increase in the engine performance, you know, roughly about 5% more power on average per engine, and the legacy system really didn't work that well. As a matter of fact about two thirds of the engine washes saw no change to the legacy way of doing it, whereas this one saw it immediately, an increase in engine performance, an increase in engine life. And then more, most importantly, and this goes back to that incentive piece. Most importantly, our maintenance folks said I don't have to remove those cowlings anymore. I don't need like several people for this job. I can do it with one person motor in the engine one person on the truck. So that really reduced maintenance man hours. And for them, that's what got them they said, yep, absolutely, we're getting more maintenance man hours on other stuff. And consequently, that resulted in them getting the aircraft availability up on all aircraft, which was a great thing. And in this case they reduced engine changes on the CB 22 by about half. So now we're also testing the same methodology on other craft to include the C 130 in the case you 135 because we think it'll help in all those applications, maybe not as much as it did in the CB 22, especially from a maintenance manpower perspective. But again, you know, 5.5% of a $750 million fuel bill per year in the case you 135 is nothing to sneeze at and if it increases maintenance availability for other stuff that we get the adoption there. The second thing we're looking at and this a lot of the strategy was developed with us and delta tech ops, the folks out in Atlanta and you know service all the delta airlines engines and airframes was the strategy behind look at how you wash it and look at how you code it so we've been working with this company called MDS technologies on their black gold coating, which appears to do a much better job of coding the compressor blades, you know, at about the 18 month point you'll see traditional compressor blades start to wear down where the black gold black gold coated planes will not. And that results in the engine just running that much more efficiently and the compressor working that much better for longer periods of time. Next slide. So some of that money that we were saving and fuel. We have a method now to recoup that money and we've been using that money to get after other things that we think make a lot of sense for the airports and this is one of those things. How do we get crews that maybe don't have access to an aircraft, like 24 seven and because they're doing the mission how do we get those crews familiarized with the aircraft. How do we get the maintainers, the aircrew, the pilots familiarized with the walk around procedures things that they will find wrong. And this is where we've been working with this one company to digitize the interior and exterior of most of our bigger aircraft, and, and then providing these low cost headsets to those folks who are awaiting training. And now they're stepping into training. And, and they know the aircraft now they know much better than they would have otherwise. And that results in a much quicker ability to get them up on step and qualify to perform maintenance or perform operations in the aircraft, as well as we think it's really good for a, I don't have to have a training asset on the flight line, you know, when that training asset could be used airborne to get aircrew trained. So that that that dual piece is really resulted in some pretty good adoption from the air mobility plan that you know is the beneficiary of this training funds. Next slide. So this is going back to that, that that jet at the top of the screen there. That's he's at Al Ud Air Base. If you look behind him, you can might be able to see it but there's actually that white board that they were using until 2017. So from 9 11 2001 to 2017, we were using dry erase markers magnets on white boards to schedule a 250 receiver 50 tanker schedule per day. And turns out Eric Schmidt from Google was part of what they call a defense innovation board here in the States, and he was visiting different places to look at the software we're using. And he saw that he goes you got to be kidding. And so we initially started with this process of looking at that, that particular task that was taking eight to 12 hours. And how do we reduce the timeline and increase the efficiency on it we've got about 4% improvement in efficiency and about, you know, a pretty large reduction about 66% reduction in manpower because instead of eight to 12 hours to get that done. And by the way, their shift was eight to 12 hours, two to four hours. They actually did a side by side where folks were still working whiteboard the other folks will work in the electronic whiteboard. After, it was supposed to be a month after four months, the folks working the whiteboard we're like yeah we don't want to do this anymore we want to do what you're doing, because you're doing it more efficiently. And now it's two to four hours so I can actually go eat lunch, I can actually go work out while I'm deployed. And again, that's an incentive that they saw. And what we saw was that's great, but that's kind of like paper map to the crappy GPS I have in my Highlander Toyota Highlander right where it's 10 years old 12 years old. I want Google Maps or ways or something that's a lot more effective so we added on this thing called Pythagoras, where it runs through an algorithm for them. It doesn't take over the task, but it makes that task a lot easier because it'll give them suggestions about a way to maximize capability of that schedule, and real time because the turnaround time now is like two to four minutes of providing a solution. Now you get this idea where, if you're actually in combat you can iterate both tanker delivery or munitions delivery or other things, logistics delivery of stuff. You can iterate that type of work much quicker than you could in the past. So the thought process is, and it went from about that 4% that initially got to like 10 to 20% better. So a huge savings in fuel on the order of about 200,000 gallons of fuel saved per week in that one location, which when we start adding up the numbers that's a lot of money being saved, and a great payback. So we were looking at, okay, how does that process also help for allocating our aircraft in locations or scheduling our aircrew or optimizing our cargo. So these are some estimates of what we think we will be able to save in all these different areas. But, you know, just not only are we saving in fuel and greenhouse gas emissions, which are second and third or effects of really what we're trying to do is maximize combat capability. We think that provides our force a much better, much better solution for the 21st century by next slide. It's taking a little longer, so I'm going to kind of go through these latest ones. C2D2 and the idea of doing better communications we think is really important for us. So we put some investments in to work that's already existing that helps transmit and securely transmit data from aircraft to the planners back, you know, at wherever it might be like Pearl Harbor or, you know, Hickam Air Force Base for the air, air mobility center there, or all the way back to Scott Air Force Base, as well as there are other things that we saw that if you like sync up the ability to text. So our crews now instead of walking the base ops and getting the facts from the guys at Scott Air Force Base on what their mission plan is, they receive it on their iPad, and it has all their paperwork in it. And it gives them the ability to ask questions from the crews back at home about optimizing that schedule. And then what we also realize is that ability to communicate and to have some kind of natural language processing to, to track those communications also would help bubble up problems in certain areas that hadn't been identified. Like delays in aircraft delivery of parts or complications with fuel systems in certain locations. Now the generals can actually see the conversation, get a roll up of the things that are going on and maybe act quicker to to fix problems. Next slide. And then, you know, for us, it's really important to kind of ingest the data, understand what it's telling us, and help us make sure that we're putting our money against those programs that make the most sense. So we, you know, again, from this safety perspective, what we've done is we've been able to tap into the data that was being collected on aircraft that is being deposited at the Air Force Safety Center, pull it into the OSD data lake. And now we're able to go, we'll get to the point here in the next couple months, where we'll be monitoring those engine washes and being able to provide back to the maintenance folks, when the next session engine washes do. And we've released off of the performance in the engine, that's really, we're just at the cutting edge of that, but we think that's immensely valuable for us to select the right aircraft for the right mission because we know how it's behaving and we know what parts going to break next or we have a good idea what parts going to break next because we're tracking the data and we're tracking the health of the asset. Next slide. And then this gets back to something that's unique to the United States but, but there's no reason why it couldn't be translated to other countries and the way they manage their money. You know, what we did is we talked to the Senate Armed Services and the House Armed Services Committee, because they provide oversight to us and they basically are the ones that do the final stamp on what our budget will look like. And we told them, hey, you know, every year, we scramble our fiscal year goes from October 1 to September 30. Every year we scramble to make sure we're spending all of our, we call operations and maintenance money, which a lot of that is fuel. We're trying to make sure we spend that all and there's really no incentive not to spend it. So we typically end up doing not so efficient things at the end of the year that will spend that money because we know it goes away on the first of October. And if you can help us with funding these efficiency initiatives, then perhaps you will see a bigger amount of savings at the end of the year. And if you will let us take some of those savings and reinvest it by allowing that, that those funds that are typically have a life of one year, maybe one extra year, then we will, you know, stop relying on you to provide us funds every year in the budget because we will have this, you know, replenishment of savings every year that we can put back into mission. And that's what they agree to do. So some of that money that I talked about for AR VR training, we actually recouped it and put it back into mission. And this year, we think we're going to get roughly about $36 million. And then next year or probably closer to 50 and the year after probably close to 75 and get in the hundreds of millions. And really, we think Congress might say, wait, wait, wait, because I don't think they realized how big of an opportunity this is. But for us, you know, our strategy is 5% reduction in in fuel burn over the next five years and 7.5% over the next 10 years. And that's in the hundreds of millions and we think we can at least use some of that to pump back in. We're roughly seeing about a 1% change in efficiency right now on that five to $7 billion bill per year. So that's 50 to $70 million per year that we are able to recoup. And we think that will result in this incentivization with folks like, you know, the state sustainment folks who are initially like, Hey, wait a minute, you know, I've already got challenges with this aircraft. You know, I can't take any more work that will allow us to provide the money and manpower to maybe get after things that they want to do that we want to do to like formal antennas or additional engine efficiency savings that are resulting in them having aircraft that are down because the engines are broken. Okay, next slide. So, you know, just in closing, we recognize and the reason that you don't see a lot of like let's say electrification of aircraft in this discussion is that you know we fly big aircraft long distances and electrification really isn't. We think the first thing that we're going to go after because we think there's a lot of low hanging fruit, what we use in the United States to say low hanging fruit in just our processes and our technologies getting caught up to 21st century. And we think that by going after that, we will additional will build additional disciples within the Air Force that want to help us because they know that there's these funds that they can recoup to get after the problems that they have that overlap with problems that we have. So that's, that's my presentation and standing by for questions.