Lockheed Demonstrates 5G-Enabled Aircraft Maintenance Capabilities

Lockheed Martin demonstrated maintenance capabilities before U.S. Army and Air Force officials to show how 5G and advanced analytics can improve aircraft maintenance.

According to Reeves Valentine, vice president of land and maritime solutions at Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems, the Network-enabled Analytics for Readiness 5G initiative proved that the concept is scalable and portable and that it could work on various aircraft platforms. He added that the solution, comprising “intelligent troubleshooting applications,” is compatible with the 5G .MIL ecosystem.

NeAR is part of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering’s FutureG initiative, Lockheed said.

One NeAR-enabled application is artificial intelligence-driven cognitive search, which helps maintainers and technical experts perform aircraft diagnosis faster and identify complicated issues in real time. Using AI and 5G together, engineers could look for historical maintenance records across aircraft fleets to identify similar issues and look for solutions.

The NeAR initiative is one of several 5G-focused demonstrations the company performed. In late September, Lockheed worked with Verizon to test how 5G-enabled drones could collect and transfer data quickly and in real time.

In August, the company showed how 5G could enable high-speed and secure data transfer for maintenance analysis. And in February, Lockheed started prototyping a 5G network infrastructure testbed for the U.S. Marine Corps to speed up commercial technology integration with the U.S. military.