Air Force Pushes Open Architectures Across Fighter Fleet

While the Air Force advances development of the F-47 fighter and unmanned Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, the officer overseeing the service’s fighter portfolio wants to make it easier to rapidly upgrade aircraft already in the fleet.

“We have to modernize our fielded our fielded fighters, and that that can range,” said Brig. Gen. Timothy Helfrich, portfolio acquisition executive for fighters and advanced aircraft at the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center within the Air Force Materiel Command, on Monday.

Appearing on the Mitchell Institute’s Aerospace Nation webinar, Helfrich said modernizing the Air Force’s existing fighter fleet is happening alongside its work on the sixth-generation F-47 and CCA autonomous wingmen.

Those efforts include new electronic warfare (EW) capabilities for the F-16, updated satellite communications (SATCOM) and radar for the F-15 and what Helfrich called “the single largest modernization effort” for the F-22 to preserve its first-look, first-shot, first-kill advantage.

But while those upgrades will bring different capabilities to individual fighters, Helfrich said he’d like to see a more horizontal integration across platforms to onboard new functionality quickly as soon as it develops.

“You’ve got to put in the calories, put in the kind of the resources to force horizontal integration and to get that lift, to get the ‘I’m investing in EW on one weapon system, and I can immediately use it on the next,’” he said. “We put into place what we call integrated capability teams. We have five of them, and they really go mainly along mission systems.”

To ensure horizontal development, Helfrich said the Air Force is working across integrated capability teams targeting electronic warfare, infrared, line-of-sight and beyond-line-of-sight communications, compute and software, and exportability so that new functionality isn’t siloed into a single fighter program.

Underpinning these efforts is a push to adopt open compute that will allow the Air Force to effectively plug and play new capabilities once they are developed.

“Most of the time in our fielded platforms, we have very specific dedicated computers that have a closed architecture to them. … It’s as simple in some cases as having an open compute card inside of a box that allows us to, in an open architecture, add in new capabilities,” Helfrich said. “Maybe I’ve developed a skill on the F-22 for we’ll just say electronic warfare, and it’s compliant with our open architecture. I now have compute that I can put that on an F-15 or an F-16, and I can use that very same skill. I don’t have to go develop it twice.”

He added that the flexibility of open compute for the current fleet originated from the lessons learned on the F-47 and CCA programs, which already have the open architecture in place to modernize quickly.

“One of my goals is to get open compute, on all of our aircrafts in a reasonable time frame,” Helfrich said. “That opens up so many possibilities for adding new capability quickly and leveraging those open architectures.”