The US Department of Defense is revamping a 14-year-old strategy for maintaining a global fleet of Lockheed Martin F-35 fighters that relies heavily on a currently dysfunctional automated system and a just-in-time logistics model managed by the contractor.
The sustainment plan is “evolving” less than three months before the US Marine Corps is set to declare the first F-35B unit operational, says Sean Stackley, assistant secretary of the navy for research, development and acquisition, speaking on 14 April at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC).
The current concept for ordering spares for the F-35 relies on the autonomic logistics information system (ALIS). It was designed to receive downloaded information from the F-35 during and after each sortie, then automatically detect and troubleshoot all systems and parts failures and generate orders to Lockheed for any spares or replacement parts.
US Air Force maintainers at Eglin AFB were visited recently by US lawmakers and voiced several concerns about ALIS, says Representative Michael Turner, the chairman of the HASC’s Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee.
In response, Stackley agreed the just-in-time logistics model governed by the contractor should be changed.
“The operations and sustainment plan for the progrmame is evolving and being developed frankly to do better than what you’re hearing from maintainers today on the flight line,” Stackley says.
The ALIS was originally conceived as one of the most forward-thinking aspects of the tri-service fighter programme. By invoking the term “autonomic”, programme officials were suggesting that the F-35 would be maintained in the same manner as biological autonomic systems, which allows animals to breathe and circulate blood without thinking. ALIS was supposed to monitor the F-35 and sustain the fleet in a similar manner.
But the reality of the ALIS system has proven far less reliable. The five million lines of code includes many bugs. Maintainers at Eglin AFB reported a false positive rate of about 80%, Turner says. The system was also too bulky for the Marines to deploy on the USS Wasp amphibious assault ship, says Representative Tammy Duckworth, a former Army National Guard helicopter pilot and logistics officer.
In response, Bogdan noted that the high false positive rate reported by the Eglin maintainers was partly attributable to the base’s concentration of early-model F-35s, which are the “dogs” of the fleet. He also says that the programme is developing a lightweight, deployable version of ALIS that will be ready when the Marines declare initial operational capability of the F-35B.
“It’s a problem,” Bogdan says. “We know it is a problem. And we have to address it.”
Source: FlightGlobal.com
