The nations who want the plane are still committed to it but not as enthused as they were originally. The reason why its going up is the software problem, which I believe was discussed earlier this week. They need to get a handle on it.
They won’t. It isn’t possible to do so.
The F-35 is trying to be too many things to too many customers. This inflates software (and hardware) complexity, regardless of whether we’re talking of a defense project or a commercial computer system. The number of changes sought, even at this late date, are absurd.
Engineers like to say: “You can have it quick, cheap or perfect. Choose two.” In this case, they’re trying to have all three, but with the additional dimension of serving the interests of the partner nations and their requirements, as well as the joint defense contracting spread-around for the political purposes of not making it look as tho we want to enrich only American contractors on this project.
For all of these reasons and more, the costs are going to balloon through the roof.
Kill it. Kill it now, kill it dead. It’ll be the cheapest money we’ve ever spent. The cost estimates for the lifetime of the project have gone from $1.38 trillion dollars to $1.51 trillion dollars in the last year.
That’s a pretty fair chunk of change increase in just one year.
As for the partners: Their buying intentions numbers are going down, not up, from 730 a/c to 697 a/c. IOW, the projected costs are going up and the projected purchases are going down. The whole “economy of scale” argument should now be dismissed out of hand, because there is no data extant to support the idea on this project.
The issues with the project, btw, are not limited to the software. The Ahern report of last autumn identified a number of issues:
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/274217/dod-quick-look-ahern-report.pdf
The report doesn’t list software as a major issue, but does list buffet, frame fatigue life and
execution as big issues. The frame fatigue life has an interesting double-whammy: as the number of critics of the costs of this thing grow, the Lockheed/DOD people start trying to extend the useful lifetime projections of the platform... but these extensions then run up against the issues of metal fatigue in airframes, which means that in order to actually achieve such extended lifetimes, the airframes must be inspected and possibly overhauled, bringing significant back-end costs into the overall price tag of the platform.
IMO, they’re increasingly grasping at straws to keep everyone on board this white elephant.