MARCH 14, 2013
Concurrent Productionâ•˙ Exacerbates Multiple Problems
When Money is No Object: the Strange Saga of the F-35
by LEE GAILLARD
On 14 January, very shortly after the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) released its 2012 annual report on progress in various Pentagon programs (including a 16-page section on the F-35), Turkey announced a one-year delay in the purchase of its first two Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighters. Why? High cost yield and flight and combat capabilities that are not at the desired level yet╡. In short, the F-35 doesnât work and itâ•˙s too expensive. (See GlobalFlight.)
Thats just the tip of the iceberg for what is the most expensive military procurement program in history. While some will argue that the key word in the Turkish statement is yet, one must ask whether Turkey or the United States and all other partner F-35 nations will ever get what they were initially promised.
Several sources (Aviation Week & Space Technology, FlightGlobal, et al.) have provided briefer summaries of the F-35 annual report. But few examine the implications of what the DoD has published, or ask questions that should have been asked years ago.
For its competition against Boeingâ X-32, Lockheed Martin built two X-35 prototypes, the first of which flew on 24 October 2000; the first Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP) version flew about six years later, on 15 December 2006. Now, over 12 years since that first flight, roughly 65 F-35 airframes have been delivered 43 of them produced during 2011 and 2012; the 100th aircraft is now on the assembly line.
Not one is combat capable. Even in training flights they face restrictions.
We are dealing with an aircraft that has been produced and tested in fits and starts, hobbled by a massively expensive and ineffective program of what is euphemistically called a concurrent production where you build, fly, test, repair, redesign, retrofit, re-testall at the same time, a process patented by R. Goldberg; money is no object.
Part of the problem is, of course, that Lockheed Martin presented us with two versions of what Detroit would call a concept car a one-off only superficially representative design smaller and lighter than the actual fighter of which it was supposed to be a working prototype. The X-35A flew only 27 test flights in the one-month period before its test regimen ended on November 22; the X-35B (converted from the A) flew 48.9 hours of tests in 66 flights during the roughly six weeks from June 23 to August 6, 2001. And theC variants test regime lasted less than a month from February 12 to March 10, 2001: 73 test flights totaling 58 hours (including 250 carrier-type landings on the runway at Patuxent River; no mention of how successful the arresting hook turned out to be). For the most part, then, test sequences of roughly one month with flights averaging less than an hour each.
Under those conditions, what kind of ˘wring-out testing could these two aircraft do that would reveal future problems with transonic buffet, wing roll off, and the other significant issues that appeared from the start during testing of LRIP aircraft? Thus, when the Pentagon signed on the dotted line for the first lot of LRIP F-35s, it was buying an untested, larger, heavier paper design that hugely increased risks in any concurrent production program. We are now facing the consequences.
F-35 Lightning in flight.
For all F-35 versions, according to the DOT&E report, the pilots helmet-mounted display system doesnt work; the F-35C is not yet carrier-qualified because the tail hook didnt work, had to be redesigned, and only now is being re-tested; the ejection seat in all models would put pilots at serious risk in any non-level flight mode above 500 knots (i.e., most dogfight scenarios); since flight control software is itself still under development, the computerized flight control system lacks crucial intended capabilities; key structural components have cracked and require redesign. The list goes on. Yet Lockheed Martins Fort Worth plant keeps churning out F-35s in all their defective glory. And those aircraft already produced now need retrofits of software and flight critical hardware.
TBC