Like the other military services, the Navy has been working in recent years to improve the readiness of its aviation fleets – especially since cuts under the Budget control Act almost a decade ago dealt a serious blow to readiness. Bigger maintenance budgets over the last few years have helped, but money isn’t everything. The Navy is trying to innovate its way out of the readiness problem too, and with some success, thanks to a combination of processes borrowed from the commercial airline industry, data analytics and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. On this week’s show, Jared Serbu talks to two of the people working to refine the Navy’s processes and apply emerging technologies to the aircraft readiness challenge. Robert Smith leads the reliability control board data analytics team at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division in Patuxent River, Maryland, and Jason Thomas is the team’s principal analyst – he focuses on AI, modeling and simulation, and conditions-based maintenance.