Eglin getting two new F-35 labs
- April 7, 2015
- / David Tortorano
- / government
When the United States Reprogramming Laboratory was established here nearly five years ago, the then-squadron commander made it clear why the lab was important to the F-35.
“Without mission data, the F-35 is a very pretty, and some would say very loud, aircraft,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Tim Welde, 513th Electronic Warfare Squadron (EWS) commander. “With mission data, the F-35 is pure lethality.”
Call it the brains behind the brawn.
Now, Eglin is scheduled to get two more of the multimillion-dollar labs beginning this year, both catering to the needs of U.S. allies. Add to that the fact that Eglin is where F-35 pilots and maintainers from all U.S. branches and foreign nations are trained and it’s clear Eglin is the epicenter for activities that put the fight in the F-35.
The Lockheed-Martin F-35 Lightning II has had its share of controversy. The most expensive weapons program ever, it’s had growing pains, like other new weapon systems. But it’s a far more capable warplane than predecessors, a digital jet packed with fiber optics and programming that makes it a flying computer. It’s designed with jaw-dropping capabilities requiring more than 8 million lines of coding. For comparison, a million lines of coding is roughly 18,000 pages.
[sidebar]
F-35 USRL
• Manning and funding split 50/50 between the Air Force and Navy
• Staffing by Air Force active duty and Air Force and Navy government civilians and subcontractors
• 140 personnel (75 Air Force, 65 Navy). Will peak at 157 in 2017 with eventual steady state of 145.
• Expertise: mission data programmers (engineers), lab operators, maintainers and technicians, test engineers and managers, operational analysts, IT support and intelligence specialists.
[/sidebar]
Indeed, computer coding underpins all the F-35 capabilities. It enables flight controls; radar functionality; communications, navigation and identification; electronic attack; sensor fusion; and weapons deployment. As of January 2015, more than 89 percent of the required F-35 software was flying. About 99 percent of required software had been coded, leaving 90,000 lines to be written, according to Lockheed.
What gives the F-35 battle smarts are the mission data files being created by Eglin’s electronic warfare experts.
“The mission data is solely produced by the government,” said Lt. Col. David Perez, commander of the 513th EWS. “Our lab here is entirely a government-owned-and-operated lab producing these files.”
Traditional electronic warfare reprogramming focused on defensive systems. But in the F-35, data is required for offensive capabilities, as well.
The data packages -- the Air Force is working on 12 data files for 12 geographic regions2 -- hold terrain and enemy threat information, including enemy radar, surface-to-air missiles and fighters, along with data on friendly forces, non-belligerents and commercial aircraft -- all that the pilots need for battle space awareness.
[caption id="attachment_21108" align="aligncenter" width="300"]
The F-35, including the simulator, relies heavily on millions upon millions of lines of computer coding. (U.S. Air Force courtesy photo)[/caption]
The F-35 is “capable of detecting any entity that’s in the airspace it’s operating, whether it be a threat, what we call a red system, a good guy, what we call a blue system, or neutral folks that we sometimes call gray systems, and also all the commercial systems, which we refer to as white,” said Perez.
The F-35s will go into battle packed with more data than other fighters.
“If you take two other Air Force platforms, the F-22 and the F-15, our mission data loads that we’re building are, in rough terms, about twice as big as that of an F-22 and about 10 times as big as that of an F-15,” said Perez.
All that information leads to the most distinct feature of the F-35: data fusion. Massive amounts of information from an array of sensors and mission data files are fused and provided to the pilot as clear, integrated, actionable information. It’s presented within a cyborg-like, custom-fitted helmet that’s the epitome of what the F-35 is all about. It’s where the intelligence of man and machine comes together.
When the 513th EWS was activated in April 2010 to operate the $300 million Air Combat Command’s United States Reprogramming Lab (USRL), its task was to create, modify, validate and verify mission data files for the Air Force F-35A, Marine Corps F-35B and Navy F-35C. Being the sole provider of electronic warfare capability was a considerable undertaking.
The Pentagon had to do something to relieve the heavy workload of the Eglin lab. But there was another problem to address. It was the issue of access to source codes. The Pentagon has had a policy of never sharing source codes for any U.S. weapons system. But the F-35 is being developed by the United States, the primary funder, and partner nations who have spent millions. They wanted access to source codes to be able to modify data packages to suit their needs.
In October 2014, Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan, executive director of the JSF Program Office, said a compromise was reached that would ease the Eglin lab workload and at the same time provide reprogramming labs for partner nations.
As a result of that compromise, there are now two mission data reprogramming centers: Reprogramming Center – East (RC-East) at Eglin, and Reprogramming Center – West (RC-West) at Naval Air Station Point Mugu, Calif.
RC-West consists of the F-35 Reprogramming Laboratory (FRL), and its customers are Japan and Israel. Other nations will join that lab in the future.
RC-East, run by the 53rd Electronic Warfare Group (EWG), right now consists of the USRL run by the 513th EWS. In the near future, two more labs will be part of RC-East. In mid-2015, ground will be broken for the Australia, Canada, United Kingdom Reprogramming Lab (ACURL). Then in mid-2016, there will be a groundbreaking for the Norway, Italy Reprogramming Lab (NIRL). The labs will permit them to customize mission data that will be loaded on their planes.
“They will be manned by a combination of foreign nationals from each of those countries, as well as by U.S. government personnel and U.S. contractors,” said Perez.
Gulf_Coast_Aerospace_Corridor.com is a website created in 2008 to highlight aerospace activities along the Interstate 10 corridor between New Orleans and Northwest Florida. It includes reference material, job postings, a daily aerospace newsfeed and weekly column. In 2011, the website teamed with several journalists to create the Gulf Coast Reporters’ League, which writes and publishes an annual book about aerospace in the region. The first book was published in June 2011. In September 2013, the League launched an eight-page quarterly aerospace newsletter, which became a bimonthly in August 2014 after the League published the fourth edition of the annual.
All the books can be found at: www.gulfcoastaerospacecorridor.com/gcacbooksall.html;
and all the newsletters can be found at www.gulfcoastaerospacecorridor.com/gcacnewslettersall.html.
The F-35, including the simulator, relies heavily on millions upon millions of lines of computer coding. (U.S. Air Force courtesy photo)[/caption]
The F-35 is “capable of detecting any entity that’s in the airspace it’s operating, whether it be a threat, what we call a red system, a good guy, what we call a blue system, or neutral folks that we sometimes call gray systems, and also all the commercial systems, which we refer to as white,” said Perez.
The F-35s will go into battle packed with more data than other fighters.
“If you take two other Air Force platforms, the F-22 and the F-15, our mission data loads that we’re building are, in rough terms, about twice as big as that of an F-22 and about 10 times as big as that of an F-15,” said Perez.
All that information leads to the most distinct feature of the F-35: data fusion. Massive amounts of information from an array of sensors and mission data files are fused and provided to the pilot as clear, integrated, actionable information. It’s presented within a cyborg-like, custom-fitted helmet that’s the epitome of what the F-35 is all about. It’s where the intelligence of man and machine comes together.
When the 513th EWS was activated in April 2010 to operate the $300 million Air Combat Command’s United States Reprogramming Lab (USRL), its task was to create, modify, validate and verify mission data files for the Air Force F-35A, Marine Corps F-35B and Navy F-35C. Being the sole provider of electronic warfare capability was a considerable undertaking.
The Pentagon had to do something to relieve the heavy workload of the Eglin lab. But there was another problem to address. It was the issue of access to source codes. The Pentagon has had a policy of never sharing source codes for any U.S. weapons system. But the F-35 is being developed by the United States, the primary funder, and partner nations who have spent millions. They wanted access to source codes to be able to modify data packages to suit their needs.
In October 2014, Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan, executive director of the JSF Program Office, said a compromise was reached that would ease the Eglin lab workload and at the same time provide reprogramming labs for partner nations.
As a result of that compromise, there are now two mission data reprogramming centers: Reprogramming Center – East (RC-East) at Eglin, and Reprogramming Center – West (RC-West) at Naval Air Station Point Mugu, Calif.
RC-West consists of the F-35 Reprogramming Laboratory (FRL), and its customers are Japan and Israel. Other nations will join that lab in the future.
RC-East, run by the 53rd Electronic Warfare Group (EWG), right now consists of the USRL run by the 513th EWS. In the near future, two more labs will be part of RC-East. In mid-2015, ground will be broken for the Australia, Canada, United Kingdom Reprogramming Lab (ACURL). Then in mid-2016, there will be a groundbreaking for the Norway, Italy Reprogramming Lab (NIRL). The labs will permit them to customize mission data that will be loaded on their planes.
“They will be manned by a combination of foreign nationals from each of those countries, as well as by U.S. government personnel and U.S. contractors,” said Perez.
Gulf_Coast_Aerospace_Corridor.com is a website created in 2008 to highlight aerospace activities along the Interstate 10 corridor between New Orleans and Northwest Florida. It includes reference material, job postings, a daily aerospace newsfeed and weekly column. In 2011, the website teamed with several journalists to create the Gulf Coast Reporters’ League, which writes and publishes an annual book about aerospace in the region. The first book was published in June 2011. In September 2013, the League launched an eight-page quarterly aerospace newsletter, which became a bimonthly in August 2014 after the League published the fourth edition of the annual.
All the books can be found at: www.gulfcoastaerospacecorridor.com/gcacbooksall.html;
and all the newsletters can be found at www.gulfcoastaerospacecorridor.com/gcacnewslettersall.html.
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