The F-35 Has To Phone Texas Before Taking Off
Patrick Tucker – Defense One January 8, 2015
http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/01/f-35-has-phone-texas-taking/102525/?oref=d-mostread

The U.S. military ran the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter through a series of
tests aboard the USS Nimitz super carrier in San Diego in early November. It
performed adequately, with one exception — it needed to send its diagnostic
data to Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth, Texas, before taking off. If the most
recent exercises are any indication, the F-35 may need to phone home every
time it sets out on a mission.

First, the good news. The plane flew through its aerial paces well enough
and passed a majority of its flight tests.

“The test team accomplished 100 percent of the threshold test points and 88
percent of the objective points during deployment, completing 33 test
flights (39.2 flight hours) and 124 arrested landings, of 124 attempts,
including one night flight with two catapult launches and two arrested
landings. The results of the test were still in analysis at this time,”
Pentagon spokesperson Air Force Maj. Eric Badger told Defense One.

Pilots gave the plane high marks, telling U-T San Diego writer Jeanette
Steele that the plane’s handling was “responsive” and describing the
experience as “fun.” The tests were originally scheduled for July but were
postponed because of problems with the jets’ nosewheel steering motor, the
arresting hook system, and, of course, this summer’s engine failure.

The possible bad news to emerge from the recent tests is this: The Nimitz
didn’t have the plane’s Autonomic Logistics Information Systems, ALIS, on
board and so the team had to implement a “workaround.” ALIS is the F-35’s
notoriously buggy diagnostic system that can ground fully functional
aircraft.

History may one day call ALIS the most frustrating, expensive and
counter-productive piece of software engineering that the military has ever
created. It’s so bad it’s been on “60 Minutes.” In February 2014, CBS News
Pentagon correspondent David Martin showed that ALIS was resistant to human
override instructions even when it was forcefully grounding a plane because
of a part mislabeled in a database. It was the worst sort of tyrant, both
blind and powerful.

“She looks basically like a laptop computer, and the pilot carries it out to
the plane and sticks it in a slot right next to him in the cockpit. That
contains all the information about the mission he’s going to fly,” Martin
said in his report on the F-35. “The servers which run all of this software
take up a room about the size of a shipping container.”

ALIS has a rather strained relationship with Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher
Bogdan, the man in charge of the F-35 Program, as Military.com’s Brendan
McGarry reported in February, Bogdan has few kind words for the system.

“ALIS doesn’t always work right and it is not the font of all knowledge
about the airplane because I got maintainers out there who fix the airplane,
I’ve got pilots who go out and pre-fly the airplane, and everyone in the
enterprise thinks the airplane is ready to go except ALIS,” Bogdan told a
defense budget conference. In terms of manual overrides, Bogden said “we
need to start doing that… We can’t do that wholesale, but we need to do that
in a measured way.”

The Nimitz testing team’s “workaround” streamed the plane’s diagnostic data
to technicians at Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth, Texas. That, in turn,
allowed them “to process the necessary maintenance actions” so the tests
could proceed.

Is it a big deal? The main point of ALIS is to reduce repair and maintenance
time for ground crews aboard ships like the Nimitz. Here’s how Lockheed
explains it in an information card. “ALIS receives Health Reporting Codes
while the F-35 is still in flight via an radio frequency downlink. The
system enables the pre-positioning of parts and qualified maintainers on the
ground, so that, when the aircraft lands, downtime is minimized and
efficiency is increased.”

The Pentagon has not yet said whether the issue that kept all the ALIS
equipment off the Nimitz was related to the difficulty of integrating a
shipping container worth of servers into the ship’s structure, the software
(up to 29 million lines of code and counting for the F-35) or something
else.

If the military’s super stealth fighter is expected to out-shoot, out-jam
and out-fly similar Chinese or Russian craft, it should be able to take off
without calling Texas first.
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Patrick Tucker is technology editor for Defense One. He’s also the author of
The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move?
(Current, 2014). Previously, Tucker was deputy editor for The Futurist,
where he served for nine years. Tucker's writing on emerging technology