What will the Electronic Consolidated Automated Support System benches bring to the fleet? A lot of capability in a smaller, smarter package. It starts with a much smaller footprint with more capability, faster run times, multi-lingual test environments; it preserves the $2 billion investment in CASS Test Program Sets; it facilitates factory-to-field migration of Test Programs; it’s more interoperable with other Services’ Automated Test Equipment; it’s more scalable to fleet needs; it reduces acquisition and support costs; and it brings ‘‘Smarter” test concepts with faster and better diagnostics and reduced no-defect found rates.

Currently, CASS performs functional testing, fault detection, fault isolation, and alignment or adjustment of avionics components for almost every type⁄model⁄series aircraft in the Navy and Marine Corp inventory.

‘‘CASS has been an extremely successful program,” said Capt. Mike Belcher, Aviation Support Equipment Program Manager (PMA-260). ‘‘CASS replaced 30 different legacy testers with one family of ATE and eliminated all of the logistics requirements associated with maintaining all of those different test benches. However, because most of the CASS components are Commercial-Off-The-Shelf items, obsolescence is going to become a huge issue for us to overcome. With the newer test technologies, the time is right to modernize our ATE family of testers.”

‘‘The plan we are working on now calls for getting the competitive Request For Proposal on the street for an award in early 2009,” said Belcher. ‘‘The system design and development phase with engineering development models will last until approximately 2012. Then we’ll build some low rate initial production stations and enter full rate production in 2014. Full up eCASS units should be arriving in the fleet by 2015.”

‘‘We’ve hit our peak in terms of CASS requirements aboard the carriers. The typical carrier today has 19 CASS stations aboard,” said Bill Ross, senior eCASS program manager. ‘‘Our studies show that by 2020 we can reduce that number down to 15 eCASS stations to support the air wings of the future.”

‘‘We are committed to keeping our current CASS family modern and are embarking on a program to deal with obsolescence and technology issues,” added Ross. ‘‘CASS first went into production in 1990, and these stations have been well used. Our plan is to base a modernization program on the emerging Department of Defense Automated Test Systems Framework and we expect that industry will insert the test technologies demonstrated in the ongoing Reconfigurable-Transportable CASS (RTCASS) development program and recent joint services technology demonstration projects.”

‘‘eCASS will be a product of all of its predecessor testers. The test capability inserted in the previous testers will flow into eCASS and it is expected that as additional new weapon system test requirements emerge in the future, those too will flow into eCASS,” stated Ross. ‘‘The CASS systems have avoided almost $3.8 billion in total ownership costs for the Navy by consolidating the functions of 30 different test systems into a single system, and eCASS will continue to contribute to this cost avoidance.”