Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Air Force unwires fighter maintenance

From: NEXTEL-1
Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2004 21:44:40 -0400

Wireless/Mobile

Air Force unwires fighter maintenance
By John Cox
Network World

07/05/04

An airman with the 57th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron powers
up a portable air conditioner to cool down an F15E's avionics,
then ducks under the jet's wing to escape the broiling Nevada sun.

He opens a laptop to access via a wireless LAN the fighter's
maintenance history, checks the airframe's flight hours and
schedules maintenance on the right engine's utility hydraulics pump.

The laptop is a state-of-the-art ruggedized device from Itronix: You can
submerge it in jet fuel and still type in commands.
But the secure WLAN that connects technicians with data and application
servers on the Nellis Air Force Base network is
made up of off-the-shelf Cisco 802.11b access points and bridges.

Nellis was the incubator and first site for a WLAN model that is now
being
rolled out at 50 air bases across the U.S. It's a key element in the
service's point-of-maintenance program, which is intended to speed
aircraft
maintenance. Using the WLAN, the technicians can finish more work right
at
the aircraft, minimize travel over miles of runways and taxiways, and
pare
down time-consuming paperwork at the end of work shifts that can last 10
to
12 hours.

The Nellis maintenance WLAN grew out of early wireless experimentation
by a
team of Air Force innovators with the 57th. These 900 folks do
everything
from pump gas, change tires, and load rockets and bombs to overseeing
maintenance schedules for a half-dozen types of warplanes. They work on
the
flight line, where the jets are parked along Nellis' 3-mile-long
runways,
and in special concrete retaining areas where live munitions are stored
and
loaded.

The WLAN now blankets this entire area, giving all flight line
maintainers
instant access, at 5M to 11M bit/sec, to Nellis' Core Automated
Maintenance
System (CAMS), a database that stores all kinds of data about each
aircraft. The CAMS data is now updated faster, right from the flight
line,
and more accurately, says Master Sergeant Mark Howarth, the squadron's
network administrator.

Users no longer have to collect and restore tools, and then wait for a
ride
back to an office to use a computer.

Broader deployment

A related initiative developed by Telos, a federal systems integrator
that's been working on Air Force wireless projects for several years,
involves packaging this WLAN system into what the Air Force calls a
deployment server. This server is an easy-to-install box that can be
packed
up and shipped anywhere that warplanes have to be cared for on short
notice
in areas that lack the infrastructure on established bases.

The deployment server has been shipped to units working with the
Predator
pilotless drone, which was used in Afghanistan, and its jet-powered
counterpart, Global Hawk. Both are based at Nellis.

Eventually, the WLAN will access digitized technical data, Howarth says.
The Air Force is phasing out the bulky, printed maintenance manuals,
often
with 2-foot-long foldouts of complex schematic diagrams, with digital
data
on servers and sometimes CD-ROMs. That's already being partly done for
some
aircraft, such as engines for the F15 fighter, and completely done for
the
pilotless drones. A recent news story reported that Lockheed Martin's
plan
to introduce electronic manuals for the F16 Fighting Falcon, to replace
50,000 printed pages in 250 volumes, would save $500 million over the
remaining life of this aircraft.

A key figure in the evolution of the WLAN project is former Sergeant
Steven
Carlson, now a senior WLAN administrator with Telos, still working at
Nellis. In 1998, he persuaded his superiors to invest $95,000 in WLAN
access points and bridges to cover about 90% of the flight line and
another
$5,000 on WLAN gear to be used instead of running fiber to the distant
ordinance loading area, a project that would have cost $1.2 million.

"My people did the install, the troubleshooting and all that, and we
stayed
within USAF regs for security and management," he says. "We were pretty
much writing those regs as they are now for wireless policy."

Security initially consisted of changing encryption keys on a regular
basis
and a set of procedures for manually changing all the keys on all
laptops
and access points if necessary. Today, Nellis uses multiple layers,
including Wi-Fi Protected Access, key changes five times each hour and
running all WLAN traffic over a VPN for encryption and authentication.

Eventually, says Telos' Chief Wireless Architect Rob Smith, there will
be a
single sign-on capability, a full 802.1x implementation and a public-key
infrastructure. "Full-blown PKI requires a hardware token, like a smart
card, but the government hasn't sorted that out yet," Smith says.

Howarth and Carlson are proud that the Air Force's Network Intrusion
Team,
dubbed the Red Team, has been unable to crack the WLAN's existing
security.
"They said it was a significant improvement [in WLAN security] over the
previous generation of wireless," Carlson says.

One issue not faced by most enterprise networks was ensuring safety in
the
sites. "We checked the output power and frequencies to make sure we
wouldn't make anything go 'boom,'" Carlson says.

 http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2004/070504airforce.html

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