Another Setback For JSF

Just weeks after the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter got back to flight testing, a new design problem has cropped up. An aluminum beam in the wing structure has been found to be "defective," an issue that could lower the aircraft's wing life from 8,000 hours, or about 25 operational years, to just 1,200 hours, which equates to about five years of flying.

The GE/Rolls-Royce engine boondoggle is a good example that is running up costs and will keep running up costs in the future with duplicate parts chains. The reason for the second power plant, insofar as I can determine, appears to be wholly a political kickback/spread-the-wealth scheme to keep GE and Rolls in the future fighter engine game along with P&W.

Here’s a little report that shows that as time goes on, the costs are going up, the commonality is going down, and the schedules are blowing past deadlines. All easily predictable - when you have a multi-mission project, (eg, USAF, USN), the costs go up, just as they did on the F-111. When you have not only multi-mission, but multiple customers (our NATO “allies”), then the costs, delays and program changes blow through the roof.

http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08388.pdf

As we can see, the cost projections keep going up, up, up on the JSF. It is now so high in per-unit price that our “allies” are starting to seriously grumble about the price. The last thing we need is the US taxpayer being tapped for some kickback “aid” so that our allies can afford this aircraft so that they ultimately meet their contract acquisition numbers.

Straight out of school, I worked for a defense contractor on a NATO project that was managed by both the US and our NATO allies, and the NATO reps were Norwegians. Nice folks, but they didn’t do schedules the way Americans did. The DOD acquisition and contract office and the Norwegian counterparts never did seem to see eye to eye. Did they change technical requirements? Not exactly. They changed scheduled compliance with requirements...

Did they intend to slow things down? Not exactly.

Did they actually slow things down with their disagreements and cross-purposes? Oh yes.

The F-111 was indeed meant to be a multi-role AC from the beginning. The Navy and USAF were both shoehorning their requirements into the F-111 as far back as 1962. And that’s before we get into the requirements of our “allies” for the platform.

“No, it shows my disgust as a taxpayer.”

ALL development programs suffer growing pains, more so when the state of the art is being expanded as it is with the F-35. It is essentially 3 programs in one, albeit with unprecedented parts commonality amongst the 3, but LMT did not attempt to make a single variant perform all 3 missions. That would be folly - see the F-111. The liftfan concept for the S/VTOL Marine variant has been widely praised for its ingenuity and superior performance, still with supersonic capability! Be patient, the program isn’t in production yet...

As time goes on, the commonality is going down, not up, the price is going up, not down, and the TCO is going through the roof.

There have been umpteen project managers over the life of the project and now we’re closing in on a per-unit acquisition cost double initial estimates and a program cost approaching $1 trillion (with a “T”) dollars.

That’s absurd.

As a taxpayer, I don’t have to be patient. If the contractor cannot bring it in on time and on budget, then they should be canned or the project canned if no one else will bring it in on time, on budget.

I’ll remind you that the U-2 came in under time, under budget. The SR-71 came in under time, under budget - two past projects of Lockheed where they had only one customer and one mission. Likewise, we’ve gotten more than our money’s worth out of a large number of platforms over time (eg, B-52, C-130, F-16), but when we go into multi-mission, multi-nation projects, the costs go through the roof.

Any multi-nation project, even for a single-mission, will see costs that go through the roof.

I’m really not sympathetic to the notion that we should consider other countries’ acquisition requirements or their mission requirements in our warfighting platforms. I really don’t care about their needs. I care about our needs. If they want a shiny new fighter, they can pay for it out of THEIR tax monies.

May I remind you that both the U-2 and SR-71 were developed in a very tight, totally classified, project team environment with very little gubmint meddling and highly expedited approvals of all changes. Even so, no two birds of either type were of the exact same configuration, and there was no production run of either one. That is more akin to satellite development nowadays except for the gubmint meddling and gross funding instability...

Be that as it may, it still shows that is was possible to do bleeding-edge flight platform developments on-time, on-budget... as long as you keep a tight focus on your goals.

Bring in more than one branch of the services, and you’ve complicated your problems tremendously. We know this from multiple projects in the US military inventory.

Bring in more than the US services? Absolute insanity is the result.

A big chunk of the new cost overruns are associated with the GE/RR engine program, which is in place only because the allies wanted another engine - oh, and GE wanted some piece of the pie too.

The F136 is the engine white elephant that won’t die, no matter how many times an administration shoots at it. The budgets proposed by the executive branch in FY2007, FY2008, FY2009, FY2010 have all proposed canning the F136 engine.

Last I knew this year, the Pentagon once again wanted to can the engine, and Congress was pushing to put funding back in. I don’t know what the current outcome of funding for the F-136 is. I know that GE/RR are making a big deal that they’re “self-funding” the F136 program now, but I also know that as soon as P&W wants to make any increase in the various program goals for the F135 engine, there’s supposed to be a new competitive bid for an engine. So let’s say that P&W wants to bid a version of their engine with increased thrust. That means a new bid gets opened, which means that we’re going to see the F136 come back in.

In every year an administration has proposed canning the F-136 engine, Congress has restored funding. Why? Because Britain keeps lobbying Congress to keep the F-136 GE/RR engine project alive for the F-35, that’s why. The Dutch are said to question their future participation as a partner in the F-35 program without the F-136 engine.

Kill it, put a stake through it, let the “allies” develop their own plane on their own budgets.

A nice position to take, but totally untenable. All three missions needed a follow on replacement for current weapons systems, but the individual services couldn’t afford the costs by themselves. Involving foreign countries having requirements inputs (but not veto authority) was a reasonable approach to sharing development costs. You cited the B-52 (never exported) and C-130/F-16 (both exported), but C-130/F-16 customers ONLY paid for those delta development costs related to unique configurations meeting their requirements, not for any of the initial development costs. Lockheed footed the bill for C-130J configuration development, but the gubmint balked at amortizing those costs for pricing production -J aircraft.

If you really need to whine about something, why not complain about all the interest money, aerospace technology and industrial secrets given to, and stolen by, the communist chinese?? Those trillions pale in comparison by far to F-35 development overruns, and they have already been caught hacking F-35 technology secrets with no penalty whatsoever from the Obama regime!

If you’ve paid any attention, you’d know already that I’m one of the most persistent skeptics of “free trade” with the ChiCom’s on FR. From my perspective, the only good communist is a dead communist, and it is beyond my comprehension how giving the PRC a trade surplus with which they can fund a military expansion on our consumption is a good idea. The wholesale export of our productive economy to the PRC is suicide, both economic and military, IMO.

But hey, there’s a whole lot of Republicans who think that this is jolly good thinking, and they continue to cover up the obvious by sticking their fingers in their ears whilst chanting “Free Trade!” at the top of their lungs. To counter this, these same “conservatives” want to spend a trillion bucks on air platforms to counter a threat we never need have faced, if we’d only been content to beat the communists (which we did) and leave them beat.

Buuuut noooooooooo.... “conservatives” couldn’t seem to be content with beating the communists when we saw the USSR fall... so we had to plump up the next bunch of commies in China by allowing them permanent MFN status and then admitting them to the WTO.

If you’re directing your comments to me, you’re barking up the wrong tree! First, I’m NOT a repub; secondly, I’ve never trusted the red chinese on anything and thirdly, regardless of the naive “mistakes” our politicos have made with them, it would be suicide to concede military superiority (or even parity) to them, ever!!

I fail to see how denigrating the F-35 development effort actually helps anyone.....except the red chinese!

let’s see, the lockheed F-22 has been grounded for over a year now, and the AF is now suddenly figuring out the loackheed F-35 is going to haveproblems?
the lockheed C5 had huge wing problems, and, gee, lockheed had to bukld new iwngs for them, and guess who had to pay for them?
the F-35 design has so many major design flaws, only a blind govt procurement type would actually buy the thing. the wing spars, is only one piece. the huge cut out in the body for the lift fan, the fans transmission and gear box,etc, etc.

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