F-35 Fleet Solutions at Maintainers Fingertips

In today’s aerospace and security environment, maintenance professionals will play a pivotal role in ensuring warfighters have the tools and technologies they need to stay ahead of advancing threats. For the team maintaining the Royal Australian Air Force’s (RAAF) F-35 fleet, real-time access to data is critical to ensuring persistent mission readiness.

Enter the F-35 fleet management solution. This technology, provided to the RAAF by Lockheed Martin and ILIAS Solutions, recently showed how it can enhance F-35 maintenance operations by providing new insights to maintainers.

So how does it work?

“The F-35 fleet management solution integrates RAAF F-35 data with the ILIAS Defense Platform to enable a modern user interface,” said Rob Weitzman, F-35 program manager for Australia. “This provides an intuitive set of fleet management visualizations, planning, scheduling and decision-making tools to F-35 maintainers.”

Essentially, by integrating data from the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS), the IT backbone that enables holistic fleet management, and the ILIAS system, maintainers are able to glean detailed insights into the past, current and future state of fleet readiness. This integration also improves the use of ALIS in maintenance execution. Through these real-time insights, the RAAF can perform sovereign fleet data analysis and determine what the next best action is to improve aircraft availability. 

“Through close collaboration with the RAAF and ILIAS, we were able to deliver one source of truth for the RAAF F-35 fleet,” Weitzman said. “With the new fleet management solution, RAAF F-35 maintainers now have enhanced real-time analysis at their fingertips, with quicker decision-making power to launch the mission.”

The translation of F-35 program fleet management requirements and dedicated RAAF user stories won’t just serve as a benefit to the aircraft fleet itself – it will also enhance and improve processes for managing associated critical assets like simulators and support equipment. And through advanced software integration, the RAAF will be able to continue improving fleet performance, even as the fleet expands over time – essentially making the tool future-proof.

The fleet management solution is a part of Lockheed Martin’s vision for 21st Century Security, which calls for integrating networking capabilities to enhance readiness, connectivity and capability across the global F-35 fleet.

So what’s next for the tool?

The RAAF implementation will serve as the benchmark to introduce the technology to other F-35 fleets and will also be expanded to support C-130J fleets. Using the insights gathered from the RAAF, Lockheed Martin and ILIAS will continue to evolve and refine the current ALIS-ILIAS interface to maximize fleet performance while minimizing the logistics footprint.