Risky ALIS To Provide F-35 Long-Term Maintenance And Support

Lockheed Martin intends to provide long-term maintenance support for the F-35 Lightning II with a new Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS), cited as a risk in a recent study, in line with the evolving aircraft.

Known as the F-35’s information technology backbone for data collection, data analysis and decision support, the ALIS receives aircraft health and maintenance information from F-35s in flight via radio-frequency downlink.

Appropriate users then use a web-based distributed network to access the information also the ALIS enables the pre-positioning of parts and maintainers on the ground, supporting F-35 maintenance and supply chain management. System managers are then automatically notified to take the advised action.

In 2007, the initial ALIS software release was reported to have nearly 40 percent of the system’s planned capabilities when it was formally “switched on” at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics headquarters.

The system is now running at Eglin AFB in Florida, where the first military pilots and maintainers are undergoing training at an F-35 Integrated Training Center.

In 2012, a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) cited ALIS among ongoing “affordability” risks with the F-35 program. The agency said that the F-35 testers concluded in an operational assessment report that an early release of the system “was not mature, did not meet operational suitability requirements and would require substantial improvements to achieve sortie generation rates and life-cycle cost requirements.”

Although the ALIS has been operational for years, air force officials are wary due to the security issues that come with the software. The ALIS is not impervious to cyber attacks and the risk only continues to grow. The US Marine Corps, one of the primary customers of the aircraft, is planning to deploy short take-off and vertical landing F-35Bs to its training base in Yuma, Arizona, but without a certified and functional ALIS system, the aircraft are essentially inoperable.

The company has "made some tactical progress" on fixing software issues, installing and operating the complex Block 3 software remains the largest hurdle.

A Lockheed Martin F-35 program spokesman said a “verification of data” test conducted at Eglin AFB in the first quarter “identified some issues that need to be worked.” Many of those issues are classified and could not be discussed, he said.

Steve O’Bryan, vice president of F-35 program integration and business development, said 90 percent of the ALIS system capability at Eglin AFB will be achieved by 2013.