by John Goodman, Senior Writer
NAVAIR Public Affairs
19 July 2004

Air Combat Electronics, PMA-209, performs especially complex and important work for NAVAIR. If you thought it was only black boxes and avionics software, you’d be ignoring activities like air communications, airborne networking, mission avionics, navigation, and flight operations. Two of the most significant PMA-209 programs involve planning and managing for the avionics future of Naval Aviation, plus making sure the funds are there to endow it.

Going to CAMP

The Core Avionics Master Plan, or CAMP, has been around since 2001. A new version, in the works for two years now, outlines the capabilities that avionics will need to provide to keep our platforms relevant in the event of future wars. On 18 May 2004, RADM Mark Fitzgerald (N78, Director of Air Warfare) directed that CAMP 2004 supercede CAMP 2001.

Avionics plays a central role in building, outfitting and connecting the battle force of the future. Its contributions are critical, since they concern the core functions of communications, navigation, cooperative surveillance, safety and mission information. CAMP is the orchestrator of these functions. Its purpose is to achieve an interlinking of all systems in network-centric warfare, the key Navy element of transformation. Captain Mike Williamson, PMA-209’s program manager, calls CAMP “our roadmap of capabilities.”

In making significant efforts to transform its warfighting capabilities, the Navy has come to stress both interoperability and commonality. Getting to common avionics equipment solutions across multiple platforms provides many benefits, among them the means to:

o pool resources
o reduce inventories and infrastructure
o pay for development only once
o reduce cycle time
o leverage larger economic ordering through quantity buys
o follow a common, sustained upgrade path to provide additional capabilities and manage component obsolescence
o enable interchangeability/interoperability across multiple platforms
o minimize the logistics burden.

CAMP offers a pathway for guiding avionics capabilities—those available today, planned for the future, and those requiring future development. Thus, it enables Naval Aviation Enterprise planners to develop their upgrades around common systems, allowing such systems not only to talk to each other but, in some cases, substitute for each other (“cross-platform commonality”). Since CAMP will do that for current, legacy and up-graded systems, it offers a way to plan for the future. Since it will also do that across the armed services—and even coalition partners—it’s a way to achieve jointness.

CAMP also helps to identify roadblocks. Captain Williamson talked about the problem of avionics equipment becoming obsolete, sometimes before it is completely fielded. “Or suppose one of your major suppliers, a chip-maker, goes out of business just after the equipment contract is over. How do you find replacement parts? How do you establish a way to prevent this from happening and stalling installation or repair of a mission-critical piece of gear? Unlike the commercial world, in most cases there are no off-the-shelf replacements available for us.”

In today’s fiscal environment, it’s more important than ever to leverage the advantages of common solutions in order to provide cost-wise readiness to our fleet. The guidance provided by OPNAV to CAMP will help achieve this objective.

Aligning through AvCIP

Platform managers need to plan for every piece of equipment’s life cycle—its development, maintenance and support over time—as well as its commonality and interoperability. To manage and provide this kind of support with an actual funding line, about ten years ago the Air Force and Navy set up a component improvement program for their engines. That program’s success inspired a PMA-209 initiative called AvCIP (Avionics Component Improvement Program), now about two years old.

This is NAVAIR’s attempt to look at avionics equipment through its entire life cycle. AvCIP also provides funding to address problems of high cost drivers, poor performance and system upgrades of existing avionics systems in all of Naval Aviation.

The program helps bridge the gap between engineering solutions generated at NAVAIR and the problems manufacturers may have in producing and developing such “fixes” and improvements. So it enables both engineers and manufacturers to keep up with technol-ogy and the state of the art. Its purpose is to get us to the future—either by keeping systems working or upgrading to keep them relevant. Williamson expects that AvCIP’s re-turn on investment will enable it to pay for itself within three years.

In another domain, Williamson serves as the Navy’s representative on the Joint Services Review Committee for Avionics Standardization (JSRC-AS), whose aim is to promote avionics standards and commonality across the armed services. The idea is to reduce expense, proliferation, duplication, production and logistics problems. In one aspect JSRC does for the armed services what AvCIP will do for NAVAIR: It helps us afford the future.

Along the way, AvCIP will greatly improve the capabilities of NAVAIR program managers, with benefits that extend throughout the Naval Aviation Enterprise. While CAMP charts our course and presents the path to future readiness, AvCIP furnishes the funds to effectively manage our current readiness.

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