{"id":26907,"date":"2019-02-27T06:00:18","date_gmt":"2019-02-27T06:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/c4isrnet\/uncategorized\/2019\/02\/27\/how-the-us-air-forces-kessel-run-team-plans-to-solve-one-of-the-f-35-programs-biggest-headaches\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T23:02:06","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T23:02:06","slug":"how-the-us-air-forces-kessel-run-team-plans-to-solve-one-of-the-f-35-programs-biggest-headaches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/c4isrnet\/it-networks\/2019\/02\/27\/how-the-us-air-forces-kessel-run-team-plans-to-solve-one-of-the-f-35-programs-biggest-headaches\/","title":{"rendered":"How the US Air Force\u2019s Kessel Run team plans to solve one of the F-35 program\u2019s biggest headaches"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 Setting the weekly flying and maintenance schedule for an F-35 squadron is a weeklong process. It takes hours for multiple people to download data from the jets and comb through it, paste information into different spreadsheets, and continuously update each system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With a new app called Kronos, on track to be delivered in early March, the U.S. Air Force is hoping it can trim the amount of time for that process to 15 minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kronos was developed by the Air Force\u2019s Kessel Run software development team as part of a new effort called Mad Hatter, which was established late last year to solve pilot and maintainer gripes with the F-35 fighter jet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If all goes well, it could lead to a much bigger overhaul of the F-35\u2019s troubled logistics backbone, known as the Autonomic Logistics Information System, or ALIS<\/a>, said Will Roper, the Air Force\u2019s top acquisition official.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere are many things about ALIS that are very frustrating and time consuming,\u201d Roper told Defense News on Feb. 12 in an exclusive interview. \u201cThe goal [of Mad Hatter] is not simply to fix ALIS within the constraints that define it. It is to make the operator \u2014 the maintainer \u2014 more efficient, to make their user experience more pleasant.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To build Kronos, the Air Force is relying on a team of developers from Kessel Run; Lockheed Martin, which manufactures the F-35 and ALIS; and Pivotal Software, Inc., which has created software and data analytics applications for the Air Force over the past several years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those coders are also working with a specialized group of maintainers from Nellis Air Force Base \u2014 called the Blended Operational Lightning Technician team or BOLT \u2014 who have helped shape the product, will test it and then return feedback to the Mad Hatter team once the first iteration of Kronos has been delivered, Roper said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
The acronym for the Autonomic Logistics Information System is pronounced “Alice,” and a Mad Hatter initiative is set to fix the system. (John Tenniel via Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou can imagine: What do the users want? They want Wi-Fi on the flight line. We believe we can do that securely. They want to have a touch screen where they have one database that can touch ALIS and all the other tools, that translates automatically. These are not Herculean tasks,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is today\u2019s technology, so the fact that we will think of this as innovation in the Air Force when it\u2019s technology we all enjoy when we go home means we need to reboot ourselves. We need to expect this for the maintainers,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mad Hatter is still in its earliest stages, but it has already attracted the attention of top Air Force officials, including Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson, who name-dropped the effort during an October congressional hearing. \u201cThe Defense Department and the Air Force is terrible at buying software,\u201d she acknowledged, but added that Kessel Run was changing that paradigm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere is a logistics system that supports the F-35 called ALIS. It cannot scale. It has got huge problems. It drives the maintainers nuts. And so we put together a team of Lockheed Martin, Air Force programmers and maintainers on the flight line,\u201d she said. \u201cThey named themselves. The new program is called Mad Hatter, rather than ALIS. It is always the young techies that come up with something.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two other applications will follow closely on the heels of Kronos. Titan will help expeditors determine fleet status, assigning tasks between maintenance teams as the workflow changes. Meanwhile, Athena is built for squadron leadership and will help section chiefs ensure maintainers are trained and performing work to build competency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll start with the BOLT [aircraft maintenance group] at Nellis \u2014 they\u2019re going to be acting as a guinea pig or a petri dish for this code,\u201d Roper said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf it works well, then there\u2019s an option for the Air Force and the Navy to move that beyond Nellis and to deploy elsewhere,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing about this tool that is peculiar to F-35s, so we\u2019re thinking beyond just F-35s. Maybe F-22s can be run this way. Maybe even fourth-gen systems.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And once Mad Hatter has a chance to prove itself with its initial apps, it may move onto a more substantial task: creating an experimental, cloud-based version of ALIS, and then helping build future software drops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team has begun the process of re-hosting the latest iteration of ALIS, version 3.0.1.2, on Pivotal\u2019s cloud foundry, Roper said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat allows you to start breaking the code up into modules and triaging parts of the code that we think can be used as they are, or parts of the code that can be used with modification, or parts of the code that we need to change to make compatible with cloud,\u201d he said. \u201cIt also allows us to use cloud development tools, which is a big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\t