The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) has shown shortcomings in its diagnostic capabilities, leading to false positives that have put an added burden on maintainers, according to its program executive officer.
“It is a fact that sometimes when the airplane lands, it gives the maintainer indications that things are wrong when they are not,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan told reporters April 14 after a House Armed Service Committee tactical air and land forces subcommittee hearing. However, it is a problem the F-35 operations and maintenance community is aware of and that the program office is working to fix.
Subcommittee Chairman Mike Turner, (R-Ohio), said at the hearing that he first grew concerned about the Autonomic Logistics Information System critical for sustaining the JSF after a visit to Eglin AFB, Fla. During his trip, he met F-35 maintainers who demonstrated how long it takes to move through the system’s screens and input information.
“When we asked them how many false positives you get, I thought they were going to tell us a high number, because it’s still a new system. But when they said 80 [percent], I was kind of taken back,” he said. Afterward, “they showed us how difficult it is to clear it because of the cumbersomeness of the system.”
One of Turner’s main concerns, he said, is that if false positives are so prevalent, actual problems with the aircraft may not be correctly communicated to ALIS.
Bogdan said he was not sure whether the 80 percent number was correct, but it was not representative of the fleet as a whole. Eglin is flying some of the oldest jets, which have a higher rate of false positives than the newer F-35s equipped with the most recent software and version of ALIS.
“When you put all of those together, we believe that a problem with health reporting codes is not going to be a big issue” when the Marine Corps declares initial operational capability as early as this summer, Bogdan said. “I believe that the airplanes that the U.S. Marine Corps will declare IOC with will show much improvement to those older airplanes that we’re seeing at Eglin.” The Marine Corps is the first service due to field the aircraft, with the Air Force and Navy slated to follow in 2016 and 2018, respectively.
The false positive issue is a problem with the plane’s diagnostic capability, not with ALIS itself, he said. ALIS, which is also developed by F-35 manufacturer Lockheed Martin [LMT], simply reports the information from the plane to the maintainer.
The program office is tackling the problem a couple different ways, he said.
“The first thing we did is we started trying to improve the diagnostics on the airplane, and we continue to do that,” he said. “With each new load of software we put out there— 1A, 1B, 2A, 2B—it gets better and better.”
The program office also has provided to maintainers a list of health reporting codes—which indicate whether a system or part is functioning as intended—that are not working correctly, allowing maintenance crews to disregard faulty codes, he said.