The Air Force has opened another Plugfest initiative focused on cyber resiliency for electronic flight bags, according to a key official.
Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Military Deputy, Lt. Gen. Arnold Bunch said Thursday the service is creating a lab environment to test the cyber resiliency for the bags, which are devices that allow flight crews to perform a variety of functions that that were traditionally accomplished using paper references. Bunch said this Plugfest effort will be brief with a goal of getting a company on contract within three to four weeks. This contract, he said, would be in the range of $1 million to $2 million. 
Plugfest is an Air Force effort to help identify and implement innovative business approaches to deliver better, faster and cheaper capabilities to airmen. The program has largely been dormant since 2015 when a handful of events were held in Northern Virginia, San Diego and online.
Bunch said a previous Plugfest effort centered on the Air Force’s Distributed Common Ground Systems (DCGS), the service’s primary intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) planning and direction, collection, processing and exploitation, analysis and dissemination (PCPAD) weapon system.
Bunch also said a crack Air Force cyber team composed of both airmen and civilians has worked on the Air Operations Center (AOC) 10.2 program. The team, known as Air Force Digital Service (AFDS), borrows civilian professionals for six-to-12 month stints to work on complex software issues.
AFDS, Bunch said, provided guidance and direction as to how the Air Force should be developing the software and how it ought to perform testing to bring AOC 10.2 up to commercial standards. AOC 10.1 is a system of systems that incorporates third-party software applications to enable its mission execution. AOC 10.2, a future upgrade, is designed to deliver a modernized, integrated and automated approach to AOC operations.
AOC 10.2, in February and March 2016, failed to complete the second of two scheduled phases of developmental testing, according to the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2016 Office of Test and Evaluation (OT&E) report. These failures occurred after contractor remediation actions taken as a result of cure notices issued in September 2014 and September 2015. A cure notice is a letter from the government to the contractor, Northrop Grumman [NOC], regarding concerns about poor performance in accordance with contract requirements.
The OT&E report said the severity and quantity of the functional and cyber security deficiencies identified during the first half of developmental testing resulted in the cancellation of the remaining developmental test events and planned operational assessment activities. As of the OT&E report’s release in early 2017, the program is conducting a critical change review. Northrop Grumman was unable to respond to a request for comment by press time Friday.
Bunch said AFDS has also worked on OCX, Raytheon’s [RTN] next generational operational control system for the GPS III satellite constellation. AFDS will continue to work on OCX, he said.