F-35 Cancelled, then what ?

[Engines]

I might be able to help with a few points that have arisen in recent posts. Please forgive me if I get anything badly wrong, I'm not on the programme now, and I'm really going mostly on professional experience.

ORAC, my sincere apologies for not being clearer in my earlier posts. What i was trying (badly) to put over is that support costs (and technical issues) tend to be concentrated on a surprisingly small subset of the entire aircraft. Things like wings, tails, fuselage and weapons bays don't really drive costs. Flying controls systems also tend to be low significance items.

What really does drive cost are hardware items that need frequent replacement and/or rectification boy the manufacturer. Engines are the prime cost driver on most jet combat aircraft, and if they go wrong the results can be ruinous. The USAF had an absolute disaster with their engines in the late 60s and 70s, and the RAF had a fairly awful (and horribly expensive) experience with the RB199. Ditto the RN with the Gem in the Lynx. Of course, the F-35B's lift system has to be a major area for attention.

After engines, it would be avionics, but I would note that hardware reliability has been one area where technology has definitely delivered in spades. Disasters like the F3's AI24 Foxhunter are now very rare, and in my 30 years as an aircraft engineer I saw massive improvements in avionics reliability (and support cost reductions). F-35B avionics hardware is, as far as I remember, nearly identical to F-35A. There will be a different software load in some areas of the flight controls, of course.

The final area I'd watch would be airframe systems - generators, power systems, actuators, valves, switchgear, etc, etc. F-35B has plenty of these, and that's another area where any commonality would help.

And yes, the Uk does manufacture around 13 to 15% of the aircraft by dollar value. Add in items built by UK owned companies in the US (e.g. BAES Avionics) and I think the figure might be higher. Yes, the F-35B figure is quite a bit higher due to the UK manufactured lift system.

PhilipG makes a very good point about support going forward, as the aircraft moves out of SDD, run by the JPO, and into through life support, where the individual services rule the roost. I honestly don't know what the US DoD has planned, but I do know that a single ALIS system will be used to manage the support chain, and there was certainly an aim that where F-35s owned by a number of countries were operating together, they would all be able to access the system. I also know that commonality was a through life issue, not just in development. I won't try to speculate further, as I'd just be wrong.

However, I think it's reasonable to assume that overall configuration control of the aircraft will be tightly controlled by the US, and that will present a challenge for the RAF, who have, in my view, not always been totally excellent in controlling 'fleets within fleets'. The situation whereby only a small number of their aircraft can actually be deployed on operations at any one time will simply not be acceptable in the future, and it's my hope (as a retired engineer, but still paying taxes) that the F-35 fleet will stay at a generally common standard as far as possible. I think JTO's post is bang on the money here.

Best regards as ever to those putting together the support plans,

Engines