F-35 Maintenance Software Comes Under Fire
By Sandra I. Erwin 4/24/2015
http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=1815

The subpar performance of the F-35 logistics information system has been a
concern for years. But it has now drawn the attention of key lawmakers who
got an earful from Joint Strike Fighter maintenance crews during a recent
visit to Eglin Air Force Base, Florida.

“The committee received numerous complaints and concerns by F-35 maintenance
and operational personnel regarding the limitations, poor performance, poor
design, and overall unsuitability of the ALIS software in its current form,”
said the House Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on tactical air and
land forces in its markup of the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act.

ALIS is the autonomic logistics information system that is hooked up to each
F-35 to monitor every component of the aircraft and to alert operators of
any breakdowns. The complaints heard by members of Congress range from the
user-unfriendliness of the software and how slowly it responds to queries,
to the high frequency of false alarms.

Military aviation experts said some of these issues are temporary and should
be expected in new programs. Glitches like too many false alarms should be
solved over time as the technology matures. Other shortcomings of the system
appear to be more substantial and might take years to fix.

The F-35 program office and prime contractor Lockheed Martin assert that
many of the current deficiencies will be plugged in future software
releases. Program Executive Officer Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan
traveled to Eglin this week to personally investigate the issues raised by
the committee. “A lot of attention is being paid to ALIS,” said F-35
spokesman Joe DellaVedova.

By Bogdan’s own account, the system will have to dig itself out of a deep
hole. “ALIS has a long way to go,” he told subcommittee Chairman Rep.
Michael Turner, R-Ohio. “It is a complicated, five million lines of code
piece of equipment that we started treating like a piece of support
equipment. It's not. It's an integral part of the weapon system.”

A major effort began two years to “change fundamentally the way we develop
ALIS,” Bogdan said. “We've applied the same techniques we used in developing
software on the airplane to now developing software in ALIS. It's just going
to take us some time to realize those results.”

One of ALIS’ most vaunted features — the ability to predict when a component
will fail and will need to be replaced — appears to be nowhere close to
coming to fruition. According to sources close to the program, ALIS doesn’t
have enough of the data that would allow maintainers to forecast part
failures based on how components are used and how they perform in flight. It
is not clear when the prognostics capability will work.

A significant concern for the Marine Corps — the first service scheduled to
deploy the F-35 — is that ALIS is too incomplete for operational use, which
means that a lot of the information crews will need to fix and maintain the
aircraft will not be available so they will depend on remote tech support
from Lockheed Martin technicians in Fort Worth, Texas. Experts said that
process could end up being time consuming and increase aircraft downtime.

ALIS was conceived so that when maintainers have to remove an aircraft part
and replace it, they would have easy and instant access to instructions and
drawings. ALIS also would help them interpret any failure codes that come
off the aircraft and determine what procedures to employ.

The Marine Corps will be the first service to deploy the short-takeoff
vertical landing version of the F-35 later this year, and it has chosen to
declare the airplane operational even with a less-than-optimal ALIS system.
Maintenance crews aboard big-deck amphibious ships will be dependent on
technical support from Texas if ALIS is unable to provide the information
they need.

Software engineers at Lockheed Martin are rushing to deliver ALIS upgrades
to the F-35 fleet, said Sharon Parsley, spokeswoman for Lockheed Martin
Mission Systems and Training.

“The F-35 military services understand that ALIS will continue to gain
capability along with each release of block software on our newest
aircraft,” she told National Defense in a statement.

Parsley said the Eglin maintainers who gave ALIS bad reviews were using the
earliest versions, known as Block 1B and 2A. The jets that are now flying at
two bases in Arizona — Luke Air Force Base and Marine Corps Air Station
Yuma — have the latest version of software called 2B.

A new update, ALIS 2.0.0, was delivered to F-35 locations, including Eglin
in March, she said. “We expect many of the issues the airmen there are
experiencing to improve.” Two other releases currently are in development,
ALIS 2.0.1 and 2.0.2. The full ALIS capability is due in 2017, said Parsley,
“in line with the conclusion of the F-35 system development and
demonstration program phase.”

An underlying question is whether the Marines will be able to get by with
the 2.0.1 version of ALIS that still lacks the capability to manage
life-limited parts. That feature is expected in ALIS 2.0.2, which is the
version that the Air Force needs in order to declare its F-35A operational
next year.

The software eventually will have to undergo rigorous tests in combat-like
conditions by the Pentagon’s independent test and evaluation office.
Operational tests of the Marine Corps’ Block 2B mission software, along with
ALIS, were supposed to take place a year ago but were delayed. Testers still
do not believe the system is ready, and Pentagon procurement officials
agreed.

Turner’s language in the NDAA, meanwhile, could mean yet another probe of
ALIS, this one by the Government Accountability Office. The scrutiny will
persist, especially in light of the feedback lawmakers got at Eglin. The
frustration that members saw in F-35 maintainers is likely to stick with
them as such interactions tend to be rare.

During an April 14 subcommittee hearing, Turner said he was “taken aback” by
the operators’ critiques of ALIS. “I was also shocked that there's no spell
check,” he said. That means users have to manually identify misspelling and
correct errors, which causes delays and potentially could put lives at risk.
Crews also were unhappy with the reporting system for the availability of
parts or status of the inventory.

Rep. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., a former military aviator, said she, too, was
alarmed by what she heard. Her impression was that the system is very labor
intensive, slow to respond, and too bulky for use on ships. Duckworth said
it was “troubling” that aircraft crews aboard ships at sea will have to
reach back to Fort Worth for logistical support.

Bogdan agreed that the transportability of ALIS is a major issue. “Today
ALIS sits in a squadron and it's a rack of computers that weighs probably
800 to 1,000 pounds,” he told Duckworth. “We recognized a year-and-a-half
ago that was not going to work for deploying forces.” Lockheed is designing
a deployable version that will be ready for the Marine Corps in July, he
said. It is a two-man portable system made up of three or four different
racks.

In the future, Bogdan said, ALIS will be made in a deployable configuration.
“We will get rid of the old thousand-pound racks that we have at the
squadrons now.”

ALIS is now deployed with more than a hundred operational F-35s from the
Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, United Kingdom, Australia and the
Netherlands.