March 12, 2019 | International, Aerospace
By: Valerie Insinna
EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. — The F-35 fighter jet's logistics backbone has proven so clunky and burdensome to work with that the U.S. Air Force's instructor pilots, as well as students learning to fly the aircraft, have stopped using a key piece of the system, Defense News has learned.
The Autonomic Logistics Information System, built by F-35 manufacturer Lockheed Martin, was supposed to consolidate training, maintenance and supply chain management functions into a single entity, making it easier for users to input data and oversee the jet's health and history throughout its life span.
ALIS has been a disappointment to maintainers in the field, with updates coming behind schedule and many workarounds needed so it functions as designed. But the Air Force's F-35A instructor and student pilots at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, and Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, were so disappointed with the performance of ALIS' training system that they bailed entirely, confirmed Col. Paul Moga, commander of Eglin's 33rd Fighter Wing.
“The functionality in ALIS with regards to TMS — the training management system — was such a source of frustration and a time waste to the instructor pilots and the simulator instructors and the academic instructors that we at [Air Education and Training Command] in coordination with us [at Eglin] and Luke made a call almost a year ago to stop using the program,” Moga said during a Feb. 26 interview.
Moga said the command's F-35 training squadrons are “not going to start using TMS again until it works.”
So in the meantime, F-35A training squadrons have adopted a legacy system, Northrop Grumman's Global Training Integrated Management System. GTIMS is used by the Air Force, Army and Navy across a number of aircraft inventories to manage training schedules and cut the man-hours and costs associated with doing that work, according to a Northrop fact sheet.
At this point, GTIMS provides a more agile, efficient user experience than ALIS' training management system, Moga said. But it doesn't sync with ALIS, so pilots and instructors must do “double data entry” so that each system has a record of flight records, currencies and qualifications.
July 3, 2024 | International, Land
Rheinmetall and Leonardo established a joint venture to fill gaps in the Italian Army's force structure, namely its MBT and AICS programmes.
September 23, 2020 | International, Naval, C4ISR
Steve Trimble Northrop Grumman has revealed the first photograph of a pod for the Next Generation Jammer-Low Band (NGJ-LB) system possibly weeks ahead of a competitive contract award. The U.S. Navy image released by Northrop shows the full-scale candidate for the NGJ-LB contract during testing inside the Air Combat Environment Test and Evaluation Facility's anechoic chamber. The image reveals a pod with a dimpled outer mold line similar to the ALQ-99 low-band pods, which the winning NGJ-LB design is expected to augment and then replace. Northrop and rival L3Harris recently completed anechoic chamber testing of both competing NGJ-LB pods while wrapping up the 20-month Demonstration of Existing Technologies phase, which precedes a contract award for the engineering and manufacturing development phase scheduled in November. Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) has budgeted $3 billion to develop and build the NGJ-LB pods over the life of the program. Each pod will be integrated on the Boeing EA-18G aircraft. The low-band pods will complement the Raytheon NGJ-Mid-band pods now in early production. NAVAIR also has expressed long-term interest in a new high-band pod. https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/sensors-electronic-warfare/northrop-grumman-reveals-low-band-jammer-candidate
June 3, 2024 | International, Naval
Terma was awarded a contract to supply four SCANTER 6002 naval surveillance radars for the 2 Belgian and 2 Netherlands Navy Anti-Submarine Warfare frigates.