Miscellaneous

Lockheed Martin taps Red Hat for F-22 Raptor upgrades

Red Hat, one of the world's leading providers of open source solutions, has announced that it has  worked with Lockheed Martin to modernise the application development process used to bring new capabilities to the US Air Force’s fleet of F-22 Raptor fighter jets.

“By working with the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs team, we changed everything ‒ our toolchain, our process, and most importantly, our culture. With our new culture firmly rooted in DevSecOps and agile, and a more flexible platform based on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, the F-22 team will continue its work to ensure the Raptor meets America’s defense needs,” remarked Michael Calwood, VP, F-16/F-22 Production Development, Lockheed Martin.

Through an eight-week Red Hat Open Innovation Labs residency, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics replaced the waterfall development process it used for F-22 Raptor upgrades with an agile methodology and DevSecOps practices that are more adaptive to the needs of the US Air Force.

Together, Lockheed Martin and Red Hat created an open architecture based on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform that has enabled the F-22 team to accelerate application development and delivery.

The Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor is one of the world’s premier fighter jets, thanks to its unique combination of stealth, speed, agility, and situational awareness.

Lockheed Martin is working with the US Air Force on innovative, agile new ways to deliver the Raptor’s critical capabilities to warfighters faster and more affordably.

The F-22 is the world’s most dominant fighter, but potential adversaries continue to develop capabilities intended to challenge the ability of US and allied air forces to gain and maintain air superiority. Maintaining that asymmetric advantage requires a constant focus on rapid innovation.

The traditional waterfall development process was not getting critical capabilities to the warfighter fast enough. It previously took five to seven years to identify requirements and release new capabilities for the existing architecture, initially built in the early 1990s.

That time-consuming process, along with code quality and integration issues, led to onerous rework and customization, resulting in a platform that no longer met Lockheed Martin’s expectations for software-led innovation.

For Lockheed Martin, keeping the F-22 Raptor out front was not simply about upgrading its hardware and deploying a modern software platform. Instead, it also sought to create a team culture rooted in innovation and collaboration to transform its approach to application development.

To do this, Lockheed wanted to adopt principles and frameworks common in software lexicon like agile, scrum, minimum viable product (MVP) and DevSecOps.

Lockheed Martin chose Red Hat Open Innovation Labs to lead them through the agile transformation process and help them implement an open source architecture onboard the F-22 and simultaneously disentangle its web of embedded systems to create something more agile and adaptive to the needs of the US Air Force.

Paul Smith, senior VP and general manager, Public Sector, Red Hat, said: "Lockheed Martin developed one of the fastest fighter jets in the world and needed a development process to match that speed."

"Through its work with Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, Lockheed Martin has been able to integrate DevOps practices like domain-driven design and lean thinking into their environments. Now, reduced planning times are allowing for faster release cycles that can deliver significant benefits to the US Air Force," he added.-TradeArabia News Service