The Defense Department’s new weapon system-like approach to the F-35’s Autonomic Logistic Information System (ALIS) is starting to pay dividends, according to the program’s executive officer.
F-35 PEO Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan said Fed. 25 that ALIS, which is the aircraft’s information technology backbone, was originally treated as “support equipment” to the F-35, but then the program realized ALIS was “way more important and way more complicated” than that. As part of a cultural change, the F-35 joint program office started treating ALIS like a weapon system, one that Bogdan said needed the same discipline in terms of software, testing and configuration management that it would in any other weapon system because of how essential it is to the program. An item doesn’t need to be a weapon to be designated a weapon system. The Air Force has designated cyber capabilities as weapon systems to help position them for continued management and sustainment funding.
Though Bogdan said the program is in catch-up mode with ALIS, the new approach is starting to pay off.
“Normally in ALIS, when we put something out, we’re taking one step forward and two steps back,” Bogdan told an audience at a conference hosted by
McAleese and Associates and Credit Suisse in downtown Washington. “This time we actually took a step forward and didn’t take a step back.”
Despite the good news, the program has a lot of work to go with ALIS. Bogdan said when the F-35 program was started, the program office “assumed ALIS would work perfectly” and when F-35s first arrived at bases, DoD told operators and maintainers they could never override ALIS. According to F-35 prime contractor Lockheed Martin [LMT], ALIS transmits aircraft health and maintenance action information on a globally-distributed network to technicians worldwide. It also integrates a broad range of capabilities including operations, maintenance, prognostics and health management and supply chain, among others.
Since it discovered that ALIS wasn’t as perfect as originally envisioned, Bogdan said DoD should start thinking about giving operators and maintainers the authority to override ALIS in a “measured way” because the program office needs to trust its F-35 people, which Bogdan called the cream of the crop.
“We have to start figuring out a way to open up that envelope for them a bit,” Bogdan said. “Not wholesale, we have to do it safely, but in a way that allows them to start managing their own fate a little bit instead of listening to this very complicated logistics system, which we thought was going to be perfect, (but) is far from perfect.”
ALIS 1.03, the latest version, hit the field in the last two weeks. F-35 joint program office spokesman Joe DellaVedova said Tuesday Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Ariz., was the first site to implement ALIS 1.30 on Feb. 8 and that Luke AFB, Ariz.; Nellis AFB, Nev.; and two other sites completed implementation over the weekend of Feb. 15.
Bodgan offered “moderate confidence” that DoD would be “darn close” to meeting essential F-35 goals for 2015 and 2016. Those goals are initial operational capability (IOC) declarations for the Marine Corps’ F-35B in July 2015, Air Force F-35A in July 2016 and the start of operational testing around August 2015. These are in addition to delivering jets to partner nation Italy in 2016 and jets to partner nation Israel by the end of 2016.
“I’m venturing today how far off I am on those dates by days and weeks, not months and years,” Bogdan said. “Now as you go out further past that to 2017, 2018, it gets a little more fuzzy.”
Bogdan said he saw risk in the Oct. 31, 2017, deadline for the end of system design and development (SDD) for what the program office calls the Block 3 version of the airplane. But pay attention to those 2015-2016 deadlines, Bogdan said, because those will be a good prediction of how the SDD deadline will go. Bogdan said because he’s a realist, he predicts the program office to be late on the SDD deadline, but only by zero to six months.
“Would that be terrible…yes,” Bogdan said. “When I make a commitment, I want to meet that commitment, so any day past Oct. 31, 2017, which is the official date of the end of development on this program, any date past that is not good enough for me.”
Along with prime contractor Lockheed Martin, the F-35 is developed by subcontractors BAE Systemsand Northrop Grumman [NOC].