This ‘cloud in a box’ could save Air Force maintainers years of paperwork

Every time a KC-135 lands, it’s greeted by a swarm of maintainers armed with three-ring binders and stacks of paper forms, sometimes tablets or laptops—all necessary to determine and document the plane’s readiness to fly again. Converting that information into a readable format to update commanders can take 14 hours. 

To shrink that turnaround time, the Air Force Rapid Sustainment Office is developing a prototyped “cloud in a box”—a portable data and compute center that can effectively hold the maintenance records of every aircraft the service has in a container the size of a window A/C unit. 

“The goal is digitizing the flight line,” Col. Nathan Stuckey, military department program executive officer at the Air Force Rapid Sustainment Office, told Defense One. “Having that maintainer, having that digital assistance … to help them maintain and repair our aircraft.”

The product hits a trifecta: it’s a digital, cloud-based dashboard that displays maintenance data from disparate systems, a ruggedized box with compute and storage, and it offers the ability to access everything from a mobile device. Users can also load the cloud-based platform onto the box, called Google Distributed Air-Gapped Appliance, which can operate even when disconnected from networks. 

By teaming up with Google, the Air Force designed “a marketplace of data input and output” from several systems with “real time readiness reporting” so the data never needs to be manually re-entered at a workstation, said Josh Marcuse, director of strategic initiatives at Google Public Sector. 

And the system doesn’t have to be hooked up to the internet to function. 

“We have to have systems that will still work when our networks are attacked,” Stuckey said. “If you're in the Pacific trying to fix an airplane and your location loses all internet connectivity, this system's still got to work.”

Maintainers will be able to do their work and then reconnect the box to the network to update headquarters with essential mission data, like parts that are needed, which is available in seconds instead of hours. Less important information, like a video to assist in a repair, are deprioritized, Stuckey said. 

“Information that higher headquarters needs to plan the fight, know what aircraft are available. That kind of data can be prioritized, so the second you get that connection, it's immediately seen by higher level. If it is lower priority data, you know, that might take a little bit … to see, but we're doing it in such a way that the most important data is available immediately,” Stuckey said.

The other feature with potential to change how maintainers work is the ability to securely connect with personal devices, Stuckey said. 

“During a demo, I was able to use my personal phone and log into the device and get that dashboard. And that's the way. The vision is that a maintainer will be able to use their mobile devices, tablets, phones, to be able to access what they need at their fingertips.”

Current demonstrations of the “cloud in a box” have been limited to a handful or users over a handful of days. But the goal is for the tech to be a trusty digital assistant for maintainers, starting with select units. 

The plan is to launch the prototype at Nellis Air Force Base, Nev. and Minot Air Force Base, S.D. and do initial concept work in the coming months. But Stuckey was hesitant to give a more specific timeline because the product is going through the Defense Department's cybersecurity certification process, called authority to operate. 

“We're in a state where getting those approvals is very soon…we're starting to talk months instead of years on when we're ready to go live” with the first and then expanded demonstrations, Stuckey said.