By Geoff Fein
While the Navy procures commercially available components for its surface, undersea and network platforms and systems, incorporating off-the-shelf technologies into aircraft, in particular the F/A-18 Hornet, is a bit more challenging, according to a Navy spokeswoman.
There are three omnipresent, sometimes competing challenges associated with using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components in the F/A-18: obsolescence, performance in the harsh Navy tactical environment, and service life, Marcia Hart-Wise, program executive office tactical aircraft programs (PEO (T)) public affairs officer, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“Due to the relatively short development cycle, time to market, and lifespan of consumer electronics when compared to the government’s acquisition timeline for environmentally hardened and thoroughly tested electronics, military avionics using COTS components frequently suffer redesigns due to obsolescence before the design ever reaches the fleet,” Hart-Wise said. “Once the design does reach the fleet, it’s certain that some COTS components will become obsolete at some point in the product’s lifecycle, requiring last-time buys, life-of-type buys or redesigns to mitigate the impacts of the obsolescences.”
COTS components also frequently have performance issues in the shock, vibration, and temperature environments experienced by Navy tactical aircraft, she added. “Industrial- rated parts are used to the greatest degree possible.”
“The industrial rated parts are tested to the full environmental performance requirement of the assembled component. In some cases, specific parts are further upscreened in order to meet the system environment requirements,” Hart-Wise said.
Boeing‘s [BA] F/A-18 requires its avionics components to be designed to a 20-year service life, significantly longer than the design goal of the electronics designed for today’s consumer market, she said.
“This service life requirement exacerbates the obsolescence challenge and is not achieved easily using parts that are not specified to operate in extreme conditions,” Hart-Wise said.
The most significant threat to electronic components is operating them at the high end of their rated operating temperatures for prolonged periods, Hart-Wise added.
“Unfortunately, this operating condition is typical in the avionics bays of most tactical aircraft, especially during ground operations,” she said. “If aircraft designers didn’t have weight and space limitations, they’d add more cooling air to optimize the avionics bays for electronics component performance.”
Although there are issues with using COTS components, that’s not to say commercially available parts are skipped over for use in the Hornet. “The F/A-18 program has been designing in improvements to the F/A-18 using COTS hardware and open architecture principles since the 1990s,” Hart-Wise said.
“The potential lifecycle savings available by using these principles is well known, accepted as fact, and considered an essential requirement for all change opportunities,” Hart-Wise added. “The F/A-18 mission computer currently uses COTS single-board processor and graphics processing modules in conjunction with COTS Real Time Operating Systems. The processing modules have been upgraded three times to keep pace with technology and performance needs.”
There is currently no plan to update the mission computer hardware in the legacy F/A-18 A-D Hornet configuration, she said.
All Block 2 Super Hornets will be updated to the third-generation Advanced Mission Computers (Type 3 AMC). Most Block 1 Super Hornets will be retrofitted with the second- generation Advanced Mission Computer (Type 2 AMC), which will be re-used from the Block 2 Super Hornets that are retrofitted with Type 3 AMCs, according to Hart-Wise.
“Mission Computer software, or the F/A-18 Operational Flight Program (OFP), is on a continual update cycle which results in a new release of software to the fleet roughly every two years,” she said.
In June, General Dynamics [GD] and Northrop Grumman [NOC] teamed to demonstrate to the Navy a cost-effective, life-extending approach to upgrading the legacy Hornet’s AYK-14 mission computer.
“The demonstrations proved that additional processing capabilities can be added using commercial off-the-shelf technology, enabling continued execution of the existing OFP without a difficult and expensive rewrite,” according to General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems.
The two companies confirmed the ability to integrate modern applications on the same processor by using the existing OFP on a commercial off-the-shelf processor and integrating it with high-order language (HOL) applications, General Dynamics said.
“The team showed the OFP can run successfully without modification by using Northrop Grumman’s Reconfigurable Processor for Legacy Applications Code Execution (RePLACEr) software emulator to run the demonstration on a single processor card with two commercially available PowerPCr chips that replicated the existing architecture.,” according to General Dynamics. “The second AYK-14 mission computer was left unmodified, showing the ability of the upgraded and legacy systems to work together.”
The demonstrations took place at the Manned Flight Simulator at Naval Air Station, Patuxent River, Md.; the F/A-18 Advance Weapons Laboratory at Naval Air Warfare Center China Lake, Calif.; and the CF-18 Hornet L-3 [LLL] MAS facility in Mirabel, Quebec, Canada.