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Agree, not sure what axe ORAC is trying to grind. No axe to grind, just looking at the dwindling industrial base and interest in sales.
Maybe with the growth in the civil market and the hassle with the DoD it's just not worth keeping a design team together any more. I'm not the first to say so, there is enough concern for a push to award design contracts for a few prototypes from each company just to keep the teams together. That seems to be
what's happening with Sikorsky.
Unless more orders turn up
the F-15 and F-18 production lines will shortly close - leaving LM as the sole surviving FJ manufacturer, and with one aircraft type
after the F-16 line closes around 2020.
There's been a lot of sucked teeth about helicopter production with sales being concentrated on old models and little or no new designs, just upgrades.
CH-47 Chinook? first flew 1961. UH-60 - 1976.
Same for transports, with the C-17 line closer the C-130 is the sole tactical lift aircraft in production - first flight 1954.
The next generation bomber will also be built in handfuls, supplementing B-52s older than their pilots grandfathers.
Analyst: It’s the End of an Era for Military Aviation Industry
Not pushing European manufacturers, their production lines and models are in even worse state.
AW&ST:
Editorial: Spinning Sikorsky, Bowing To Wall Street
......And Sikorsky is profitable. But with the military market in a downturn and its margins capped by the Defense Department, the problem is that it is not making enough money to keep Wall Street happy. It cannot keep up with its two larger sister units, Pratt & Whitney and United Technologies Aerospace Systems, which are suppliers rather than platform builders and have much more exposure to commercial markets. Gregory Hayes, UTC’s new shareholder-focused CEO, notes that Sikorsky’s operating margins of about 10% and projected sales growth are significantly lower than for the company’s other businesses.
Still, UTC stood by Sikorsky in much more difficult times, and we find management’s decision to jettison a perfectly good business troubling. During the global economic downturn, Sikorsky’s robust gains in sales and profits helped offset, to a degree, large declines at the company’s non-aerospace businesses.
The move is emblematic of a shift in the aerospace and defense industry where pleasing shareholders has become paramount, even at the expense of funding research in new technologies and products to ensure long-term competitiveness. Frank Kendall, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for acquisition, has worried aloud that some contractors are mainly interested in generating returns in as little as one or two years......
ORAC, that does make sense.
I also feel that the "gold plating" has really hurt the US manufacturing programs. With the insistence that these aircraft have to do everything superbly you cost yourself out very quickly.
F-22, F-35, Osprey, Commanche, Marine One.....
I am a believer in the high-low concept, and do understand that you need some assets that are capable of first day of war, first world peer, conflict, but I think the USA is has found itselft in the hi-hi concept. The F-35 is way beyond the orginal concpet of an affordable replacement for several airframes. Undoubetdly it will be capable, but it will do so at the expense of other aircraft. Others will be retired early, or there will be no appetite or funding for new complemtray designs.
As you say when there is only fighter in town, competition withers and dies.
I would like to see more money in R&D, more in alternative concepts (like back up engines), real fly-offs, and some "good enough" programs. Yes it costs you more up front.
I would like to see an A-10 replacement program, and I think we see now a stand alone Harrier repleacment would have been preferred over the compromiosed F-35B. The US Army high speed lift lift looks like a good model. Pushes the envelope, but within reason.