As commercial market support for devices to upload mission data in older aircraft ground to a halt, the Air Force faced a critical issue.

The devices, based on aging PC technology, were quickly becoming obsolete. That prompted a collaboration between the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center Engineering Avionics Division and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Traditional development methods could have taken many years to produce results, so officials turned to the Air Force Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) Program to form a partnership – and find an innovative fix – with California-based Physical Optics Corp.

In less than three years, the company provided a low-risk strategy to mitigate immediate obsolescence issues and outlined an optional, longer-term path to a fully modern digital storage solution.