HOW THE APACHE LONGBOW IETM LEARNED A FOREIGN LANGUAGE: The Benefits of a Commercial Approach

Fielding the AH-64D with new foreign military operators requires flexible supportability concepts. Case in point is the Apache Longbow Interactive Electronic Technical Manual (IETM) used to conduct Longbow unit and intermediate level maintenance. Many prospective foreign operators desire the functionality of this tool but fear their field level technicians lack sufficient fluency in English to use it optimally. But the technical environment makes translating the IETM into a foreign language extremely challenging. The U.S. Apache Longbow IETM is database driven, not organized into pages or documents, meaning that standard desktop publishing technology is not available. In addition, the current IETM viewpackage software supports only roman characters, not the complex Eastern and Middle Eastern characters. Fortunately, Boeing is developing a web-based IETM product, the Boeing Data Courier Web™, which uses a more open, less proprietary technical design than the current application. Due to the flexibility planned into its commercial design, Boeing developers could adapt the new product quickly to enable display of foreign languages. With the help of translation suppliers who also used commercial best practice, prototype IETMs in Japanese and Korean were produced in just a few months time. The prototype demonstrations proved that there was a feasible technical approach able to serve the customer’s special supportability requirement.