Abercrombie: F135 Mishap Shows Second JSF Engine a Must
Congressional supporters of building a second engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter are seizing upon a faulty test of the fighter's primary power plant to drum up support. In a Sept. 14 "dear colleague" letter, Rep. Neil Abercrombie, House Armed Services air and land subcommittee chairman, said a mishap during a test of the F-35's main engine, being built by Pratt & Whitney, shows two engines are necessary. The incident took place Sept. 11.
"Sophisticated fighter engine technology requires the engineering 'A team' on the job. A dual-sourced engine is good for readiness and good for competition," Abercrombie wrote in the letter, obtained by Defense News. "With current plans calling for 80 [percent to] 90 percent of the manned fighter fleet to be based on F-35A, B and C, two engine sources are required," he added. "Friday's [F135] engine failure makes this crystal clear."
Abercrombie sent the letter to members of the House Appropriations and Armed Services committees.
General Electric and Rolls Royce are developing the alternate power plant, the F136.
Abercrombie told colleagues the Pentagon is moving too fast to buy planes "without adequate testing." Those opposed to building both power plants say the F135 is performing well, the subcommittee chairman said, but "they fail to say that only 140 actual flight test hours have been logged, and there have been three engine failures, including one last Friday."
The push by Abercrombie comes amid several controversial weeks for the F-35 engine debate. With Pratt's F135 program reportedly up to $2 billion over budget, Pentagon acquisition, technology and logistics chief Ashton Carter has ordered a special team to conduct a soup-to-nuts review of the F135 effort. GE and Rolls on Sept. 1 handed Pentagon and F-35 program officials the first 100 or so F136 engines on a fixed-priced contract, as opposed to a cost-plus arrangement. The latter kind of contract typically is dramatically more expensive for the government.
While the Bush and Obama administrations have argued that the alternative is not needed and attempted to terminate that effort, Congress for the past several years has kept it alive. House and Senate conferees who will hammer out a final version of 2010 defense spending legislation will decide the fate of the alternative engine program for another year in coming weeks. If the GE-Rolls engine initiative is kept alive long enough by the Pentagon and Congress, it is slated to enter a head-to-head competition with the Pratt & Whitney power plant in 2014. The winning engine would be delivered to DoD starting in 2016.
In his letter, Abercrombie touts the benefits of competition, borrowing a line from President Barack Obama's Sept. 9 speech to Congress on health care reform. "My guiding principle is, and always has been, that consumers do better when there is choice and competition," the subcommittee chairman quoted Obama as saying. "That's how the market works."