US Air Force
"1,500+ additional aircraft availability days in a single year at one base."
The US Air Force applied TOC to transform maintenance throughput — without new aircraft or technicians.
The challenge
Mission-capable rates (the percentage of aircraft ready to fly) were consistently below targets across multiple commands. The standard response was more resources, more budget, more technicians. TOC offered a different question: what is the actual constraint in the maintenance pipeline?
The TOC solution
HAF/A4 launched formal TOC proof-of-concepts in 2018 across Air Mobility Command (AMC), Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC), and Air Combat Command (ACC). TOC flow management and DBR were applied to flightline maintenance and sortie generation. The program expanded to 35+ projects.
What happened
At Fairchild Air Force Base, the Maintenance Group exposed over 1,500 additional days of aircraft availability within one year of implementation — purely by identifying and elevating the true bottleneck in the maintenance process. The Air Force's official Tesseract program now manages TOC implementations across maintenance, logistics, supply chain, and operations.