WHAT WOULD BRIG GEN GEORGE MUELLNER HAVE SAID ABOUT F-35?

摘要

THIS OCTOBER WILL mark the 21st anniversary of the Lockheed Martin X-35's first flight, during a fly-off against Boeing's X-32 in a winnertakes-all competition. No new course could be charted for the loser. The winner could look to gain around 5,000 sales from all over the world, the majority from the USA. In the end we saw the X-35 come out on top (see The Match, page 90) and, in December 2006, the first F-35 Lightning II took flight. Thirty years after the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) competition was launched, you wonder if the likes of Brig Gen George Muellner, then Deputy Chief of Staff for Requirements at Air Combat Command, Langley Air Force Base (AFB) back in 1992, would have been happy with the jet's progress. Unfortunately he passed away on February 1, 2019, so I will never sadly have the chance to ask him. Some serious issues have been encountered along the way, particularly with the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS). I wish I had a pound for every time I heard a journo at a Lockheed Martin press call asking about ALIS. The system is supposed to manage prognostics (ie, warn the maintainers of any possible issues before they happen), the supply chain, training, flight operations and maintenance. But ALIS is so error-ridden it is being replaced by the cloud-based Operational Data Integrated Network (ODIN), but that is now lagging behind development schedules.