During the 2017 posture statement to the US Senate Armed Services Committee, the Secretary of the Air Force and Chief of Staff of the Air Force stated the Air Force suffers from shrinking aircraft inventory, aging aircraft fleets, and flying beyond the expected service life. These trends are not an exception to the B-1B Lancer, which has been in service since 1986. Recently, the B-1B Lancer has maintained the lowest mission capable (MC) rates of 47.7 percent. The purpose of this research is to explore the failure rates of the B-1B Lancer using survival analysis that investigates the failure behavior of the B-1B Lancer. A Cox proportional hazards regression model with frailty confirms the existence of unobserved heterogeneity or frailty in our analysis. When the frailty is controlled, combat missions increase in failure rates. Other variables, mainly flight hour or sortie duration related variables, are inconclusive and require further analysis. This study proposes insights based on findings and suggests future research directions
