The U.S. Air Force’s 309th Software Engineering Group at Hill AFB, Utah plans to replace the A-10 Thunderbolt’s Oracle [ORCL] Solaris 10 operating system with the Northrop Grumman [NOC] ReVAMP emulator software package.
The A-10’s Operational Flight Test Program (OFP) aims to update the close air support aircraft’s software to integrate advanced weapons and improve the A-10’s situational awareness, targeting, navigation, communications, and cyber security.
“The requirement is to provide the A-10 OFP program with a software emulator package that will be a direct replacement for the obsolete Solaris Operating System (OS) currently used by the program to develop OFP in strict accordance with the Statement of Work,” the Air Force said in a May 18 business notice. “The emulator software package identified as meeting all program requirements is the ReVAMP emulator software package sold by Northrop Grumman. It is not anticipated that the program will require any follow-on support for the maintenance of this emulator package.”
The former Sun Microsystems, acquired by Oracle in 2010, developed Solaris–a Unix operating system–in the early 1990s.
Solaris 10 “is past end of life and will no longer be approved for use on the government network after CY [calendar year] 2023,” the business notice said. “ReVAMP emulators are required to replace the emulation capability currently provided on the legacy Solaris 10 servers. ReVAMP software needs to be configured for the A-10 specific hardware system. These software emulator packages can then be hosted in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8+ server and interface with the COMET Workstation Mode aircraft/environment emulation suite. Only then can Solaris be completely bypassed and eliminated.”
The Air Force has nine A-10 squadrons but wants to accelerate the retirement of the A-10 fleet, including 42 A-10s in fiscal 2024 (Defense Daily, Apr. 19).
Boeing [BA], Korean Aerospace Industries and other companies are teamed on a second round of A-10 rewinging for installation at Ogden Air Logistics Complex, Utah.
Last May, Boeing said that it had delivered the first new A-10 wing set in the second round of A-10 re-winging to follow the initial phase for 173 of the planes (Defense Daily, May 25, 2022).
The A-10 has been a target of proposed cuts by the Air Force before, including in 2014, when the service requested the retirement of the then-fleet of 334 planes to save $4.2 billion over five years–a proposal that Congress rejected.
An Air Force A-10 program briefing last year said that 145 A-10s are non-deployable and that the Air Force has not funded a needed replacement for the A-10’s central interface control unit (CICU), which manages the A-10’s avionics, graphics, and communications (Defense Daily, May 2, 2022).
The service continues the operational use of its A-10s.
In the service’s fiscal 2024 budget for 1.1 flying hours, the Air Force’s requested increase for the A-10–2, 507 hours–was fourth behind the F-15E–13,106 hours, the F-35A–13,064 hours, and the F-15EX–4,200 hours (Defense Daily, Apr. 6).