Posted on 05/02/2006 1:53:46 PM PDT by Yo-Yo
Contract awarded on first F-35 modelsBy BOB COX
STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER
Pentagon officials have awarded Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. a $901 million contract to begin work on the first five production models of the F-35 joint strike fighter, months before the first test airplane makes its inaugural flight.
The contract, recently approved by senior Pentagon officials, flies in the face of warnings by some critics that the F-35 program is on such a fast track that it is likely to encounter technical problems and higher costs.
Now the Air Force, in an article published Monday by Defense News, has acknowledged that nearly all of the 100 or so F-22 fighters already built or in production may have serious defects that could require $1 billion in repairs.
Air Force officials told the defense publication that in ongoing fatigue tests of the F-22 they have discovered that critical titanium parts where the wing and tail attach to the fuselage do not meet the design specifications for endurance.
Lockheed is the prime contractor on the F-22 and F-35.
The Pentagon's former chief weapons tester, Philip Coyle, says the F-22 problems underscore the need to exhaustively test the F-35 before buying production models.
Too many times, Coyle said, designs and systems "that looked just fine in the laboratory ... don't work at all" in operation.
But a senior Lockheed official said the F-35 is being designed and tested during development so that problems can be spotted before the plane is in production.
"To me, this doesn't raise an issue that the F-35 is going too fast and we should slow it down," said Dan Crowley, Lockheed executive vice president and general manager.
Warnings about the ambitious schedule for the F-35 have been repeatedly issued by the Government Accountability Office, most recently in a report to Congress last month. The GAO says the Pentagon should wait a year or two, until significant flight testing of the F-35 has been performed, before beginning work on production aircraft.
Lockheed has completed assembly and is performing ground tests on the first F-35 test aircraft. It is not expected to fly until probably September or early October.
The F-35 contract initially authorizes Lockheed to spend $94.2 million to buy "long lead items" required for production of five conventional-takeoff-and-landing versions of the aircraft to be built for the Air Force, namely key parts and materials that have to be ordered well in advance from suppliers.
The first five aircraft are due to be delivered beginning in late 2008 or early 2009. Plans call for placing a second order for 16 aircraft in 2007, before the second test aircraft has entered flight testing.
Crowley said the F-22 problems are due to a manufacturing problem and not a design defect. But in the design and development of the F-35, Crowley said, Lockheed and its partners have tried to apply many "lessons learned from the F-22 program" and anticipate problem areas.
Critical observers like the GAO assume that the F-35 "will be designed the same way, built the same way and flight-tested the same way" as prior aircraft, Crowley said. "None of those are true."
Coyle said he will be "very surprised" if the F-35 doesn't run into some major issues before developmental flight testing is very far along.
A Defense Department spokeswoman said the contract issued to Lockheed contains one important safeguard. No money beyond the initial $94.2 million can be spent until Pentagon officials give Lockheed the green light after a yearly review now slated for next April.
The $901 million contract covers the maximum permissible cost for the first five aircraft, including training and maintenance and tooling for manufacturing and assembling the aircraft.
Current plans call for dozens of F-35 aircraft to be built or in production by the time the bulk of early flight and developmental testing is completed and operational testing has begun around 2010-11.
Lockheed and its suppliers have been spending about $5 billion a year since 2002 to design and develop the three different versions of the F-35, one each for the Air Force, Navy and Marines. Development costs are now expected to exceed $40 billion by the time development is due to be completed in 2013.
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Bob Cox, (817) 390-7723 rcox@star-telegram.com
Yikes! Shades of the F-111A wing carry-through box!
Aerospace ping
And who missed this? Probably Bush or Cheney will be blamed.
One classic difficulty in aircraft design is defining the load.
A classic scenario with a military (or any gubm'nt contract) is a meeting of the big shots decides that there has to be something modified. That changes the weight (and maybe the balance) of the aircraft. That means that the pricisely designed structural members are no longer adequate. Hence, redesign. Hence lost schedule, lost budget.
Happens with at least 90% of all gubm'nt acquisitions.
The original endurance test specs also may be highly overkilled due to layers of over-engineering.
$10 million each for repairs! I am in the wrong business. I'm going to start my own airplane fixing business. At this rate, I'll only need to fix a couple, then I'm done!
Lockheed should be made to eat these costs. We paid for the plan to be functional and up to speck when we got it.
Aeronaut, as a current pilot I would like to hear most things related to flying.
Please add me to your aviation ping list.
Thanks.
Didn't they have the same problem (rush development with inadequate testing of new titanium parts) in the F-14 hydraulic system? I think the prototype crashed due to a failure in titanium hydraulic lines that were developed and built ahead of schedule.
One would think that with all the years and billions of dollars of development of these aircraft, such problems wouldn't recur time after time. Maybe the military needs to go back to the procurement method in which they say that they need an aircraft that does x, y, and z, and they'll buy 500 of 'em for $xx million apiece from whoever makes the best one, and let the aerospace companies sort out the problems before selling them to we the people.
Well, I wondered what took them so long! The Air Force is slipping. This is a FUD (Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt) story, no more, no less. When your latest pet-project is close to the chopping block, it is time to start raising questions about other programs that would benefit from getting your money.
Just a well (but late) timed PR move to try to save the F-35 from being gobbled up in the push for additional F-22s.
I thought it was the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. What are you trying to do? Start a war between Dallas and Fort Worth?
Flexibility is required to osculate one's own fundament but flexibility is not capable of resisting osculation.
Is the F-35 any good as a fighter? I haven't seen anything about how well it handles compared to a F-16.
Doing a project quickly doesn't result in higher costs, it usually lowers them. Time is money. That said, most projects need more time during the critical system conceptual design phase. One you start detail design of the parts and pieces, the really big, and expensive to fix, mistakes have likely already been made. Some may not be fixable at all, and must just be lived with.
Not if it costs you $9,999,999.99 to make those repairs, when you bid on the basis that it would only cost say $9 million. But heck you made a profit, so why are you bitching? Hmm?
Both aircraft are primarily Lockheed designed and built, I don't think even LockMart would sabotage it's own program. OTOH, it's a big company, internal divisions are all too likely.
Unless you mean the F-35 SPO vs. the F-22 SPO. That's entirely possible as well.
No one can really say at this point. It has a slight maneuverability edge over the F-16, but not over the older F-18. The stealthiness is not on a par with the F-22, its a gas-hog that cant carry much weaponry. But its pretty, and you would be amazed how much that actually matters these days. Especially when you want to sell it to the whole world.
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