ALIS still a problem area...
The F-35 Has To Phone Texas Before Taking Off Patrick
Tucker – Defense One January 8, 2015
http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=66007"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...."
"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. ...."
"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. ...."
"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. ..."
18 Dec 2014, 18:34
Watching a Vigilante approach via the PLAT camera had me shaking my head. How did they do it and connect with the BARRICADE?! Gutsy stuff indeed.
