The $1 Trillion Fighter-Jet Fleet

Because the F-111 program had ALL the hallmarks of the F-35 program:

1. Multiple nations as “partners” and “customers” involved in the spec process.

2. As a result, the F-111 had a shifting set of requirements.

3. The F-111 was the “first” in a whole bunch of aspects: swing-wing, multi-mission, TFR, electronic countermeasures, yadda, yadda. The F-35 is trying to be first in several areas as well. Engineers everywhere will tell you that trying to “be first, on a budget” is a great formula for epic failure.

4. The “good money after bad” - the reason why we didn’t kill the F-111, even when it appeared that it was going to be a less than spectacular success was the argument “well, we’ve already spent all this money!”

Man, does the F-35 program have the F-111 disease in spades.

I keep bringing up the F-111 because it is THE prototype for the F-35 program. No other plane in our inventory, present or past, is as close a match to the program aspects of the F-35 as is the F-111.

BTW - none of the other planes you mentioned, with the possible exception of the F/A-18, was designed to be all things to all people. Even the F/A-18 was designed to be two or three things to the US Navy. If anyone else is interested (eg, the Aussies), they didn’t get to set the initial specs. They just found that we had a plane that could be adapted to their specs.

All those planes (modulo the F/A-18) were designed to be good at one or two roles, and then they were subsequently adapted to the other roles. The F-15 program is perhaps the best example of this. It was designed from the outset as an air superiority fighter. If you compare the capabilities of the F-15B to what the F-15E can do today, you can clearly see that they got the original F-15 concept of air superiority down pat BEFORE they went adding all the upgrades, additional stores, fuel, weaponry, ordnance, etc. Today you look at the F-15E Strike Eagle package and say “Hell yes! We can design a superiority fighter that can carry iron downtown!” Well, yes, in stages. The F-15E didn’t leap off the drawing board as you see it now. Go look at the specs for the F-15B and compare it. The “B” program was much more limited than the Strike Eagle program. There were three major upgrade cycles to get to the F-15E. They’re still modifying the F-15 for new roles today. What allows them to do this is that they have successful airframe and power plant hours behind them, so that they have some parameters inside which they must keep the design. One of these parameters is that F-15’s will never take off vertically, for example. Another one is that while they can be made ‘stealthier’, they’re not ‘stealth’ aircraft.

The problem for the F-111 (and F-35) is that they’re trying to make it absolutely perfect for all these competing roles before they’ve gotten the end result actually in service. Engineers can postulate all they want about what a pilot would like, but having actual pilots come back and tell the engineers “You know, in combat... this idea didn’t work as well as you might have thought.... can we do something about that?”

I had a neighbor whilst I lived in SoCal who was a SEA vet of many USAF fighter (and fighter-as-bomber) missions into that wonderful patch of ground, and his job when I met him was working with engineers at Lockheed, trying to keep them “on task” to address issues that pilots actually faced in combat, not what engineers thought would be groovy features to add to planes. He couldn’t say it at the time, but in hindsight, he was working on the F-22 program, even all the way back then in the late 80’s. His stories of how engineers tried to “build the perfect fighter without ever having sat in one, much less in combat...” were hilarious. He loved ribbing me as an engineer, and I became wiser for listening to a combat vet talk about Yogi Berra’s dictum of “The difference between theory and reality...”.

I took his lessons to heart, even tho I wasn’t working on his project, and it became instructive to me, as an engineer, to STFU and start asking the actual users what they wanted in a product, bypassing marketing, management (theirs and ours) and sales staffs. A good engineer talks to the end customer and says “OK, what do you *really* want?” The brutal truth is that after the customers’ requirements get through sales, then marketing, then management.... sometimes the engineers get this laundry list of outlandish features that make engineers say “WTF? Who is the idiot asking for this nonsense?” Sales, marketing and management will say “The customer!” when the truth is that the customer knew nothing about these “features.”

The sad thing in defense contracting is that the engineers rarely, if ever, get to talk to actual front-line people about “So, what do you *really* want?” in some project. Instead, you deal with all the program bureaucrats, who are mostly all paper-pushers, not warriors on the sharp end of the stick. Add in the bureaucracies of these “partner” nations and the amount of nonsense that the engineers hear becomes utterly epic, the complexity spins out of control, the productivity plummets into the ground, etc.

Build one good plane, to do one, at most two missions, build it for us and us alone, get it flying, get some feedback and start developing it in successive waves, like the F-16, like the F-15, like the F-4 if you want to compare it to that.

BTW - a great example my neighbor told me about engineers vs. pilots on fighter programs. The F-4 initially went into combat with NO GUNS. The “engineering theory” was that the F-4 would shoot down everything in the sky with missiles.

He pointed out with a hearty laugh how well that “engineering theory” turned out.

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