Thread: You Can Track Your F-35s, At ALIS' Maintenance Hub

Keeping track of…
by John Batchelor


For the last 50 years, newer fighters have been sold as requiring less maintenance than their predecessors, due to technical advances. As people like Chuck Spinney and the Congressional Research Service have documented, the reverse has been true. Escalating complexity in electronics, engines, wiring, et. al. delivers required capabilities, but creates multiplying points of failure. Each component may be more reliable than its predecessors on an individual level, but the math means they fall short when put together. In addition, the escalating complexity makes fixes in the field more difficult – and sometimes impossible. This shifts more maintenance to large, specialized rear-echelon depots, which in turn requires more transportation of parts, more infrastructure – and either longer turnaround times, a larger parts inventory of expensive equipment, or both.

The result is that each new generation of fighter aircraft not only sports a price tag that rises faster than inflation, it's also less available for flight. This, in turn, magnifies the impact of the numbers cuts that their higher price tags produce, by creating a drop in operational aircraft that's even sharper than the drop in replacement purchases. The military's reaction is to keep numbers up by keeping aircraft in service for much longer periods, hence the aging aircraft issue that plagues the USAF and most other air forces around the globe. New aircraft types are also expected to serve longer, of course, which in turn drives up their initial costs coming out of the design stage. And the flat spin continues…

That decades-long defense death spiral has finally reached a point where it's prompting musings about the collapse of American TacAir, and European countries with their small and dwindling defense budgets are also strongly affected. If the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter was to have any hope of becoming a commercial and operational success, it needed to change that operating cost dynamic. To do that, Lockheed Martin, BAE, and the international JSF team have turned to embedded HUMS diagnostics. Even that probably won't be enough, absent integration with ALIS – which an IEEE paper has described as "perhaps the most advanced and comprehensive set of diagnostic, prognostic, and health management capabilities yet to be applied to an aviation platform."

The goal of Lockheed Martin's Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) is to counteract the lowering readiness curves and higher maintenance costs that consistently correlate with advancing technology in fighter jets, and ultimately change the traditional 10 hours maintenance per 1 hour of flight ratio. Each F-35 will constantly monitor its own systems via Health and Usage Monitoring systems (HUMS) components, and automatically relay information to ALIS. The aircraft's breakthroughs in self-reporting wiring will be especially helpful, as diagnosing and fixing electrical issues is a large and difficult problem with most aircraft that tends to escalate with age.

In turn, ALIS will provide an information infrastructure that captures, analyzes (autonomically or with human intervention), identifies and communicates F-35 characteristics and data, providing information and decision support for every Lightning II user worldwide via a global network. That way, each national F-35 fleet benefits from the global experience of all fleets. The F-35 aircraft's health and maintenance actions, and even the location of parts, will be generated through ALIS, which also contain easily-updated interactive technical manuals, and tracks maintenance issues and resolution.

ALIS integrates a variety of commercial-off-the-shelf applications, in addition to its proprietary programming. Key software contributors include the UK's IFS Applications (supply chain management) and Trilogi (interactive technical manuals), Canada's MXI Maintenix (aviation maintenance management), and Siebel (CRM comunications, maintenance request tracking, et. al.).

It will also interface with the Norwegian JSF4I project, which is targeted at small and medium size defence operators who might seek to use different national systems instead of, or as a supplement to, ALIS.

All of which leads us to the most important question: will even ALIS be enough? Only time, and experience, will tell.