Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company will begin providing electronic technical data to the air forces of all 19 countries using the F-16. This year-long pilot program is expected to provide highly usable and timely information at major cost savings.

It will also pave the way for further use of electronic manuals in the F-16 Block 60, F-22 and Joint Strike Fighter programs.

Presently, technical manuals of all aircraft undergo major revisions twice a year, and hundreds of special supplements are issued between revision cycles. Producing, distributing and physically making changes to paper manuals is time consuming and costly. With electronic data, updating is planned daily, and servers at each base can download from the designated website as often as required. The base server, in turn, makes the data available to on-base users via local area networks. Maintenance personnel can use laptop computers to transport the information to the flight line and back shops.

The pilot program is called F-16 International Technical Order Digitization (ITOD). Each of the 27 sets of F-16 technical manuals includes hundreds of documents totaling about 50,000 pages. By changing the medium to electronic technical manuals from paper, all the data (both text and graphics) can be placed on a single laptop personal computer hard drive or standard compact disk (CD-ROM). Using electronic media reduces cost, storage space and airlift requirements for deployments.

The worldwide F-16 fleet has 27 different sets of F-16 technical manuals due to the configuration differences of the 19 air forces operating four major versions of the aircraft. Approximately 60 percent of the information is common across all users manuals. Electronic formatting will take advantage of this commonality and result in an estimated cost savings of 24 percent for all customers. The savings for USAF technical manuals alone would be approximately $50 million over the remaining lifetime of the F-16.

"The F-16 pilot program is a good example of responding to the Department of Defense's Electronic Commerce Initiatives and Darleen Druyun's [Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition and Management] Lightening Bolt 99-7 initiative for reduction of total ownership costs," said William B. Anderson, vice president of Customer Support at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. "The new United Arab Emirates F-16 program will use ITOD from the beginning. We look forward to implementing ITOD across all of our fielded aircraft programs as soon as possible."

  Some of the features of ITOD are:
  -- Compatible with wide variety of engineering data formats
  -- Compatible with U.S. military's Joint Computer-aided Acquisition and
     Logistics System (JCALS)
  -- System applicable to all military aircraft
  -- Compatible with commercial off-the shelf (COTS) systems for authoring,
     reviewing, editing and presenting data
  -- Gradual implementation option -- can be implemented by book or shop to
     suit a specific user's needs
  -- Transmission via compact disk or internet with a secure website
  -- User-friendly navigation features (linking, bookmarks, etc.) and
     display options.

Lockheed Martin Aeronautics is conducting this pilot project under contract with the U.S. Air Force and has a concurrent contract to further implement the ISO 8879 Standard Generalized Markup Language. These efforts are paving the way for user-friendly electronic technical manuals for future aircraft, such as the F-22 and Joint Strike Fighter.

Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company is a leader in the design, development, systems integration, production and support of advanced military aircraft and related technologies. Its customers include the military services of the United States and allied countries throughout the world. Products include the F-22, F-16, F-117, C-5, C-27J, C-130, P-3, U-2 and Joint Strike Fighter, among other renowned aircraft. LM Aeronautics is a unit of Lockheed Martin Corporation , headquartered in Bethesda, Md. Lockheed Martin is a global enterprise principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture and integration of advanced-technology systems, products and services. The corporation's core businesses are systems integration, space, aeronautics and technology services.

F-16 is a registered trademark of Lockheed Martin Corporation.

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For information on Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company, visit: http://www.lmaeronautics.com/

SOURCE: Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company