LOCKHEED MARTIN DEMONSTRATES MAINTENANCE CAPABILITIES ON 5G NETWORK

Lockheed Martin successfully demonstrated analytics-driven maintenance capabilities compatible with the Department of Defense’s 5G flight-line ecosystem.

In this demonstration presented to U.S. Army and Air Force officials, the Network-enabled Analytics for Readiness 5G initiative (NeAR) illustrated how 5G communications technology and advanced analytics minimize the maintenance burden for a variety of aircraft. NeAR is part of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering’s (OUSD(R&E)’s) FutureG initiative.

After the aircraft lands, the NeAR application provides maintainers and technical experts with complete flight data recordings and AI-driven predictive maintenance and sensor-data analytics. Lockheed Martin integrated this technology with portable devices to put these capabilities into the hands of service members on the flight line to facilitate faster decision-making.

One such application provides AI-driven cognitive search capability directly to individual maintainers and technical experts faced with diagnosing aircraft issues in real time. Users can instantly search all historical maintenance records across their entire fleet to identify similar issues and their resolutions. This information can be extremely valuable for efficient and effective troubleshooting, which minimizes aircraft downtime and erroneous maintenance actions.

These demonstrations build on Lockheed Martin’s work to develop a 5G-enabled flight line of the future. In August, engineers demonstrated that 5G technologies can enable high-speed, secure data transfer for maintenance analysis. NeAR shows what can be done with the data once it is captured from the aircraft. This technology leverages multi-access edge computing, which reduces the distance and latency gap between data requests and data delivery.

Lockheed Martin’s work in 5G.MIL helps its customers field, scale and integrate 5G technology rapidly and affordably with military communications systems at the edge, enabling heterogeneous network connectivity for operations on land, water, in air, space and cyber.