F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF)

[Good2Golf]

What would be really, really  impressive if we could make  our C-17s, C-130Js and CH-147F  "able to the tight turns and high speeds"  this new system is being designed for.    :nod:

P.S.  Some of those aircraft can fly a 0' radius turn.  Doesn't get tighter than that... 

 

[PuckChaser]

Doesn't get tighter than that...

In this universe maybe, think outside the box!!!  ;D

 

[CougarKing]

Good for the Dutch.

Defense News link

Key excerpt:

F-35 Wins Netherlands Fighter Replacement Competition

(...)

The purchase will be for 37 of the F-35A conventional-take-off-and-landing variants, which will be the most widely produced model of the jet. The US Air Force intends to purchase more than 1,700 F-35As.

The Dutch have budgeted €4.5 billion (US $6 billion) for the F-35. Because operating costs for the F-35 are still undecided, the country is putting in a contingency reserve of “10 percent for the investments and the operating costs.”

Operating under these fiscal requirements “will prevent budget displacement effects, which sooner or later would be to the detriment of other capabilities,” the statement read.

(...)

 

[MarkOttawa]

The Dutch planned buy has been cut by over 50%, leading to a tiny fighter force--37 vice 85.  If one takes the cuts in UK and Italian purchases into account, and then considers further production reductions in the nearish term if Canada and S. Korea do not purchase, 304 international sales are gone:
http://cdfai3ds.wordpress.com/2013/09/17/mark-collins-f-35-one-reason-lockheed-martin-pushing-canada-dutch-order-slashed-big-time/

Let LockMart spin.

Mark
Ottawa

 

[Guardian]

Canada used to have a mixed force of front-line fighters and light attack aircraft (CF-5s).

How about cutting the proposed CF-18 replacement order to around the size of the Dutch order to maintain a high-intensity/frontline air warfare capability, and then pick up a few dozen of something like these:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/17/tech/innovation/new-scorpion-attack-jet/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Several squadrons of these (or similar aircraft) could do sovereignty enforcement, northern patrols (twin-engine...), check out errant civilian airliners, and perform useful wartime functions after the front-line aircraft have established air superiority and degraded air defences. Those are all things we're planning to do with (very expensive) F-35 flying hours and attendant maintenance cost; if we assigned the bulk of those to a cheaper aircraft we'd save a fair bit of money.

I'll close by confessing my ignorance of air operations, but from my armchair, a return to the old CF-18/CF-5 mix with new aircraft seems a good option...

 

[CBH99]

MarkOttawa,

I was thinking the exact same thing when you posted.

A fighter fleet of 37 aircraft is TINY for any country, especially a western nation.

Canada is replacing an initially bought fleet of 135 aircraft with 65 - correct me if my initial CF-18 numbers are wrong.

I know the argument can be made that because 5Gen fighters are so much more capable than their predecessors, that we don't need to replace them on a 1 for 1 basis.  But isn't there something to be said about strength in numbers, re:  options, aircraft losses, etc etc.

My worry is that the air forces of the western world, while significantly more technologically advanced than they were, are downsizing in really substantial ways.

 

[CougarKing]

I find it ironic that a magazine like Vanity Fair was able to squeeze what are reportedly some of the best quotes from USAF Lt.General Bogdan regarding the program's "progress" to date:

Vanity Fair link

Excerpt from Page 1 of 7 pages.

Will It Fly?

The Joint Strike Fighter is the most expensive weapons system ever developed. It is plagued by design flaws and cost overruns. It flies only in good weather. The computers that run it lack the software they need for combat. No one can say for certain when the plane will work as advertised. Until recently, the prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, was operating with a free hand—paid handsomely for its own mistakes. Looking back, even the general now in charge of the program can’t believe how we got to this point. In sum: all systems go!

By Adam Ciralsky
I. Situational Awareness

At nearly 500,000 acres, Eglin Air Force Base is not the most unobtrusive piece of real estate along Florida’s Emerald Coast. It is, however, among the best guarded. The base is home to top-secret weapons laboratories, swamp-training facilities for U.S. Special Forces, and the only supersonic range east of the Mississippi. Even from a great distance, bands of quivering heat can be seen rising from the miles of tarmac. At the end of May, I flew into Fort Walton Beach, a civilian airfield that shares a runway with Eglin, a fact that was driven home when the regional jet I was on ran over an arresting wire, a landing aid for fast-moving fighters, while taxiing to the gate.

With F-15s and F-16s circling overhead, I drove to the main gate at Eglin, where I was escorted through security and over to the air force’s 33rd Fighter Wing, which is home to the F-35 Lightning II, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter, and some of the men who fly it. The Joint Strike Fighter, or J.S.F., is the most expensive weapons system in American history. The idea behind it is to replace four distinct models of aging “fourth generation” military jets with a standardized fleet of state-of-the-art “fifth generation” aircraft. Over the course of its lifetime, the program will cost approximately $1.5 trillion. Walking around the supersonic stealth jet for the first time, I was struck by its physical beauty. Whatever its shortcomings—and they, like the dollars invested in the plane, are almost beyond counting—up close it is a dark and compelling work of art. To paraphrase an old Jimmy Breslin line, the F-35 is such a bastardized thing that you don’t know whether to genuflect or spit.

When the J.S.F. program formally got under way, in October 2001, the Department of Defense unveiled plans to buy 2,852 of the airplanes in a contract worth an estimated $233 billion. It promised that the first squadrons of high-tech fighters would be “combat-capable” by 2010. The aircraft is at least seven years behind schedule and plagued by a risky development strategy, shoddy management, laissez-faire oversight, countless design flaws, and skyrocketing costs. The Pentagon will now be spending 70 percent more money for 409 fewer fighters—and that’s just to buy the hardware, not to fly and maintain it, which is even more expensive. “You can understand why many people are very, very skeptical about the program,” Lieutenant General Christopher Bogdan, who has been in charge of it since last December, acknowledged when I caught up with him recently in Norway, one of 10 other nations that have committed to buy the fighter. “I can’t change where the program’s been. I can only change where it’s going.”


The 33rd Fighter Wing’s mission is to host air-force, Marine, and navy units responsible for training the pilots who will fly the F-35 and the “maintainers” who will look after it on the ground. The Marine unit, known as the Warlords, has outpaced the others: the commandant of the Marine Corps, General James Amos, has declared that his service will be the first to field a combat-ready squadron of F-35s. In April 2013, Amos told Congress that the Marines would declare what the military calls an “initial operational capability,” or I.O.C., in the summer of 2015. (Six weeks later, he moved the I.O.C. date to December 2015.) By comparison, the air force has declared an I.O.C. date of December 2016, while the navy has set a date of February 2019. An I.O.C. declaration for a weapons system is like a graduation ceremony: it means the system has passed a series of tests and is ready for war. The Marines have been very explicit about the significance of such a declaration, telling Congress on May 31, 2013, that “IOC shall be declared when the first operational squadron is equipped with 10-16 aircraft, and US Marines are trained, manned, and equipped to conduct [Close Air Support], Offensive and Defensive Counter Air, Air Interdiction, Assault Support Escort, and Armed Reconnaissance in concert with Marine Air Ground Task Force resources and capabilities.”

The chief Warlord at Eglin is a 40-year-old lieutenant colonel named David Berke, a combat veteran of both Afghanistan and Iraq. As we walked around the Warlords’ hangar—which for a maintenance facility is oddly pristine, like an automobile showroom—Berke made clear that he and his men are intently focused on their mission: training enough Marine pilots and maintainers to meet the 2015 deadline. Asked whether Washington-imposed urgency—rather than the actual performance of the aircraft—was driving the effort, Berke was adamant: “Marines don’t play politics. Talk to anyone in this squadron from the pilots to the maintainers. Not a single one of them will lie to protect this program.” During the day and a half I spent with the Warlords and their air-force counterparts, the Gorillas, it became clear that the men who fly the F-35 are among the best fighter jocks America has ever produced. They are smart, thoughtful, and skilled—the proverbial tip of the spear. But I also wondered: Where’s the rest of the spear? Why, almost two decades after the Pentagon initially bid out the program, in 1996, are they flying an aircraft whose handicaps outweigh its proven—as opposed to promised—capabilities? By way of comparison, it took only eight years for the Pentagon to design, build, test, qualify, and deploy a fully functional squadron of previous-generation F-16s.

“The F-16 and F-35 are apples and oranges,” Major Matt Johnston, 35, an air-force instructor at Eglin, told me. “It’s like comparing an Atari video-game system to the latest and greatest thing that Sony has come up with. They’re both aircraft, but the capabilities that the F-35 brings are completely revolutionary.” Johnston, like Berke, is evangelical about the airplane and insistent that “programmatics”—the technological and political inner workings of the J.S.F. effort—are not his concern. He has a job to do, which is training pilots for the jet fighter that will someday be. He was candid about, but unfazed by, the F-35’s current limitations: the squadrons at Eglin are prohibited from flying at night, prohibited from flying at supersonic speed, prohibited from flying in bad weather (including within 25 miles of lightning), prohibited from dropping live ordnance, and prohibited from firing their guns. Then there is the matter of the helmet.

“The helmet is pivotal to the F-35,” Johnston explained. “This thing was built with the helmet in mind. It gives you 360-degree battle-space awareness. It gives you your flight parameters: Where am I in space? Where am I pointing? How fast am I going?” But Johnston and Berke are prohibited from flying with the “distributed aperture system”—a network of interlaced cameras, which allows almost X-ray vision—that is supposed to be one of the airplane’s crowning achievements. The Joint Strike Fighter is still waiting on software from Lockheed that will make good on long-promised capabilities.

When I spoke with Lockheed’s vice president for program integration, Steve O’Bryan, he said that the company is moving at a breakneck pace, adding 200 software engineers and investing $150 million in new facilities. “This program was overly optimistic on design complexity and software complexity, and that resulted in overpromising and underdelivering,” O’Bryan said. He insisted that, despite a rocky start, the company is on schedule. Pentagon officials are not as confident. They cannot say when Lockheed will deliver the 8.6 million lines of code required to fly a fully functional F-35, not to mention the additional 10 million lines for the computers required to maintain the plane. The chasm between contractor and client was on full display on June 19, 2013, when the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester, Dr. J. Michael Gilmore, testified before Congress. He said that “less than 2 percent” of the placeholder software (called “Block 2B”) that the Marines plan to use has completed testing, though much more is in the process of being tested. (Lockheed insists that its “software-development plan is on track,” that the company has “coded more than 95 percent of the 8.6 million lines of code on the F-35,” and that “more than 86 percent of that software code is currently in flight test.”) Still, the pace of testing may be the least of it. According to Gilmore, the Block 2B software that the Marines say will make their planes combat capable will, in fact, “provide limited capability to conduct combat.” What is more, said Gilmore, if F-35s loaded with Block 2B software are actually used in combat, “they would likely need significant support from other fourth-generation and fifth-generation combat systems to counter modern, existing threats, unless air superiority is somehow otherwise assured and the threat is cooperative.” Translation: the F-35s that the Marines say they can take into combat in 2015 are not only ill equipped for combat but will likely require airborne protection by the very planes the F-35 is supposed to replace.

(...)

Excerpts below from page 2 out of 7 pages.

Software is hardly the only concern. In Norway, where he was addressing the Oslo Military Society, General Bogdan said, “I have a list of the 50 top parts of the airplane that break more often than we expect them to. And what I am doing is I am investing millions of dollars in taking each and every one of those parts and deciding: Do we need to redesign it? Do we need to have someone else manufacture it? Or can we figure out a way to repair it quicker and sooner so that it doesn’t drive up the costs?” This is very late in the game for an airplane the Marines intend to certify in two years.

In January, Berke’s Warlords had a close call of the kind that brings Bogdan’s Top 50 list into sharp relief. As a pilot was taxiing out to the runway for takeoff, a warning light went on in the cockpit indicating that there was a problem with the plane’s fuel pressure. Returning to the hangar, maintainers opened the engine-bay door to find that a brown hose carrying combustible fuel had separated from its coupling. When I asked what would have happened had the defect gone undetected before takeoff, Berke replied with the noncommittal detachment of a clinician: “I think you can easily infer that, from the fact that the fleet was grounded for six weeks, there was no question that the scenario, the outcomes, were not acceptable for flying.” What he meant, General Bogdan told me later, was that it was a very close call: “We should count our blessings that we caught this on the ground. It would have been a problem. A catastrophic problem.” (When asked about this incident, the engine’s prime contractor, Pratt & Whitney, wrote in a statement to Vanity Fair, “The engine control system responded properly when the leak occurred. The pilot followed standard operating procedures when he was alerted to the leak. The safeguards in place on the aircraft allowed the pilot to abort takeoff without incident and clear the active runway. There were no injuries to the pilot or ground crew. For clarification, the grounding was cleared three weeks after the event.”)

General Bogdan, it turned out, would have a lot more to say in the course of a long and forceful interview in which he held up the Joint Strike Fighter program and the prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, to scrutiny and found both of them deficient on many counts.

II. “Acquisition Malpractice”

Washington’s Union Station, modeled in part on the Baths of Diocletian, is a fitting gateway to a city that continues to spend on the military with imperial abandon. Earlier this year, I wound my way through throngs of travelers as I waited for a call. When it came, I was vectored to the top floor of the Center Café, which occupies a circular platform with a 360-degree view of the lobby below. The man I was to meet—I’ll call him “Charlie”—is a well-placed source with a decade’s worth of hands-on experience with the Joint Strike Fighter, both inside and outside the Pentagon. Charlie explained that his choice of meeting location was less paranoid than practical: the J.S.F. program is so large, financially and geographically—and saturated with so many lobbyists, corporate executives, congressional aides, Pentagon bureaucrats, and elected officials—that it takes considerable effort in Washington to avoid bumping into someone connected with the program. And he did not want to bump into anyone. He asked that I conceal his identity so he could speak candidly.

In the course of this and many other conversations, Charlie walked me through the troubled history of the airplane and tried to separate the rosy public-relations pronouncements from what he saw as the grim reality.

“The jet was supposed to be fully functional by now and that’s why they put people down in Eglin in 2010–2011—they were expecting a fully functional jet in 2012,” he said. “But the only military mission these planes can execute is a kamikaze one. They can’t drop a single live bomb on a target, can’t do any fighter engagements. There are limitations on Instrument Flight Rules—what’s required to take an airplane into bad weather and to fly at night. Every pilot out there in civil aviation, his pilot’s license says he can take off and land in perfect weather. Then they have to graduate to instrument conditions. What the program is saying is that the J.S.F., your latest and greatest fighter, is restricted from flying in instrument meteorological conditions—something a $60,000 Cessna can do.”

Charlie cited a news report about Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for acquisition, who in 2012 had used the words “acquisition malpractice” to describe the design and production process for the Joint Strike Fighter. (In June 2013, Kendall sounded more optimistic during a conference call with me and other journalists: “I think all of us are encouraged by the progress we’re seeing. It’s too early to declare a victory; we have a lot of work left to do. But this program is on a much sounder, much more stable footing than it was a year or two ago.”)

Unfazed by Kendall’s change in tone, Charlie insists that technical problems will continue to bedevil the program. “You can trace the plane’s troubles today back to the 2006–2007 time frame,” he explained. “The program was at a critical point and Lockheed needed to prove they could meet weight requirements.” That, he says, led to a series of risky design decisions. “I can tell you, there was nothing they wouldn’t do to get through those reviews. They cut corners. And so we are where we are.” While acknowledging that weight was a pressing issue, Lockheed Martin spokesman Michael Rein told me that design trade-offs in 2006 and 2007 were made in concert with, and with the blessing of, Pentagon officials. He strenuously denied the company cut corners or in any way compromised safety or its core values.

III. Hands-Off Management

On October 26, 2001, the Pentagon announced that it had chosen Lockheed Martin over Boeing to build what Lockheed promised would be “the most formidable strike fighter ever fielded.” The Pentagon’s ask was huge: Build us a next-generation strike-fighter aircraft that could be used not only by the U.S. military but also by allied nations (which would come to include the United Kingdom, Italy, the Netherlands, Turkey, Canada, Australia, Denmark, Norway, Japan, and Israel). On top of that: Produce three versions of the airplane—a conventional version for the air force, a short-takeoff and vertical-landing version for the Marines, and a carrier-suitable version for the navy. The idea was that a single stealthy, supersonic, multi-service airplane could entirely replace four existing kinds of aircraft. And the expectation was that this new airplane would do everything: air-to-air combat, deep-strike bombing, and close air support of troops on the ground.

Lockheed Martin won the contract—worth more than $200 billion—after the much-chronicled “Battle of the X-Planes.” In truth, it was not much of a competition. Boeing’s X-32, the product of a mere four years’ work, paled next to Lockheed’s X-35, which had been in the works in one form or another since the mid-1980s, thanks to untold millions in black-budget funds the company had received from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a supersonic short-takeoff and vertical-landing aircraft.

To turn its X-35 prototype into a fleet of F-35 fighters, Lockheed has relied on two seemingly separate but equally controversial acquisition practices. In military jargon, these are known as “commonality” and “concurrency.”

Commonality simply meant that the three F-35 variants would share portions of high-cost components like the airframe, the avionics, and the engines. This was supposed to help ensure that the plane was “affordable”—a term that the company and Defense Department managers invoked with the frequency of a Vajrayana chant. But commonality did not really come to pass. The original plan was that about 70 percent of all the parts on the airplanes would be common; the actual figure today is about 25 percent. Commonality, even at this reduced level, has unintended consequences. When a crack in a low-pressure turbine blade was discovered in an air-force F-35A engine earlier this year, Pentagon officials took the only responsible course, given that the part is used in all models: they grounded the entire fleet of F-35s, not just the ones flown by the air force. In his June testimony, the Pentagon’s Dr. Gilmore revealed another, less public grounding of the entire F-35 test fleet, which occurred in March 2013 after the discovery of “excessive wear on the rudder hinge attachments.”

(...)

 

[MilEME09]

Canada used to have a mixed force of front-line fighters and light attack aircraft (CF-5s).

How about cutting the proposed CF-18 replacement order to around the size of the Dutch order to maintain a high-intensity/frontline air warfare capability, and then pick up a few dozen of something like these:

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/17/tech/innovation/new-scorpion-attack-jet/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

Several squadrons of these (or similar aircraft) could do sovereignty enforcement, northern patrols (twin-engine...), check out errant civilian airliners, and perform useful wartime functions after the front-line aircraft have established air superiority and degraded air defences. Those are all things we're planning to do with (very expensive) F-35 flying hours and attendant maintenance cost; if we assigned the bulk of those to a cheaper aircraft we'd save a fair bit of money.

I'll close by confessing my ignorance of air operations, but from my armchair, a return to the old CF-18/CF-5 mix with new aircraft seems a good option...

Heck go to CFB Borden, you have CF-5's just sitting their being maintained as training aids. Honestly with the increasing costs I could easily see something like the F-5 and F-20 make a killing in the international market. Something that i'd call cheap stealth like the proposed Boeing F-15SE Silent Eagle would work well for our domestic and foreign operations.

 

[Haletown]

1 hour 

http://www.c-span.org/Events/C-SPANs-Washington-Journal-Visits-Lockheed-Martin-F-35-Facility/10737440977-2/

Good bit on the helmet around minute 40.

 

[GR66]

What about the BAE Hawk 200 if you want to go that route?  It has some commonality with our CT-155 Hawks (including engine if I read correctly).

http://www.militaryaviation.eu/trainer/BAe/Hawk_100_200.htm

 

[AlexanderM]

The cheap option is the Advanced Super Hornet, with the new engine.  $55-60 million each.

 

[MarkOttawa]

Actually without engines--current unit cost around $80M--Super Super would be pricier:
http://cdfai3ds.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/mark-collins-real-f-35a-costs/

Mark
Ottawa

 

[SupersonicMax]

What about the BAE Hawk 200 if you want to go that route?  It has some commonality with our CT-155 Hawks (including engine if I read correctly).

http://www.militaryaviation.eu/trainer/BAe/Hawk_100_200.htm

If the engine is common, we should stay as far away as possible from it.  Our Hawks, in all honesty, are really pieces of crap.  Not a big fan of that aircraft for multiple reasons.  Engine reliability, minimal excess thrust, even in a clean configuration, cockpit size way too small (lots of current Hornet driver would not fit in the Hawk) & cockpit ergonomic to name a few...

The cheap option is the Advanced Super Hornet, with the new engine.  $55-60 million each.

What kind of equipment do you get with it?  Pylons?  Radar? RWR? MCs? Dispenser?  Jammers?.  Oh right. We have to buy them separately.  $85 million is not a  bad deal for the JSF and what it comes with.  How much did the Aussies paid for their Super Hornet again?

 

[AlexanderM]

http://www.defensenews.com/article/20130913/DEFREG02/309130015/Boeing-Pushing-Airframe-Envelope

The fly-away cost for a new Super Hornet today is just over $50 million, Boeing officials said. Adding the total ASH package for a new aircraft would run $6 million to $8 million, Summers said, while a full retrofit would run about $9 million.

 

[MarkOttawa]

AlexanderM: Check the facts at my link--there is no reason to trust Boeing over LockMart.

Mark
Ottawa

 

[Haletown]

ILS porn . . .  Very slick.

http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/AW_09_16_2013_p45-614645.xml

 

[GR66]

If the engine is common, we should stay as far away as possible from it.  Our Hawks, in all honesty, are really pieces of crap.  Not a big fan of that aircraft for multiple reasons.  Engine reliability, minimal excess thrust, even in a clean configuration, cockpit size way too small (lots of current Hornet driver would not fit in the Hawk) & cockpit ergonomic to name a few...

Interesting insights.  My uninformed opinion would be that IF we were to decide to go with a mixed F-35/low-tech fleet it could make sense to opt for an armed version of our jet trainer for the sake of commonality.  There was talk a while ago about replacing our Hawks.  The Korean T-50 (and FA-50 all weather fighter variant) might be an attractive option.  It is supersonic and Lockheed Martin is partnering with KAI to market the T-50 to the USAF as the new F-35 trainer.

 

[CougarKing]

The program's overall costs go down:

Defense News link

F-35 Costs Drop as Technical Challenges Lessen, Officials Say

Sep. 18, 2013 - 03:32PM 

NATIONAL HARBOR, MD. — The F-35 is no longer a trillion-dollar program and costs are likely to continue to drop, officials for the Joint Strike Fighter program said Tuesday.

US Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, the head of the F-35 Joint Program Office, confirmed that his office estimates the sustainment cost for the F-35 has decreased to $857 billion, a significant drop from a figure often cited as $1.1 trillion.

That larger figure was from a three-year-old government report, Bogdan said at the Air Force Association’s Air & Space Conference, and the new number reflects a more accurate assessment of the program. However, given the dangers of trying to predict costs and inflation over a 50-year period, even that number contains “a lot of assumptions.”

Speaking earlier in the day, Lorraine Martin, Lockheed Martin’s executive vice president and general manager of the F-35 Lightning II Program, said the cost for an F-35A conventional takeoff and landing variant has dropped to less than $100 million per aircraft.

“That’s a great milestone for us,” Martin said, noting that in negotiations from low-rate initial production (LRIP) 1 aircraft to LRIP-5, costs per airframe dropped 55 percent. “We are dragging costs down across the entire program.”

Martin and Bogdan both expressed confidence that previously reported issues are being addressed and will not cause further program delays.

One long-term concern has been the capability of the F-35 pilot’s helmet, required for interfacing with the fighter’s high-tech electronics. Lockheed’s helmet is suitable for initial operating capability (IOC), Martin said, but the company is installing an enhanced night-vision camera that would be put in place by the time LRIP-7 models enter production.

The tailhook on the Navy’s F-35C carrier variant has also been a running concern, but Lockheed is confident its new design has solved the problem. The tailhook will be tested in October and November with trap runs at Naval Air Engineering Station Lakehurst in New Jersey, with carrier tests due next summer.

Another concern has been the plane’s ability to fly near lightning, which is currently restricted due to a flaw in the On-Board Inert Gas Generating System (OBIGGS), used to prevent a fuel-tank explosion in case of a lightning strike. A fix has gone through a critical design review and will be put into place for the LRIP-7 models, with a retrofit option also in development for the older production platforms.

With 10 million lines of code on the plane, the biggest challenge remains software. “It is tricky, it is hard and it is the number one thing that paces the program right now,” Bogdan said.”

The Marine Corps and Air Force will be running the interim block 2B software when they declare IOC in 2015 and 2016, respectively. While Bogdan said he was confident those services will meet their IOC dates with 2B, the development of the more advanced 3F software “heavily depends” on the work that comes before.

“We are addressing and retiring risks,” Martin said. “These are all known issues that we have solutions for. We will continue to focus on them, but we are putting them behind us.”

With those known issues in the process of being fixed, Bogdan has turned his attention to newer issues as they arise.

“There are pieces and parts on this airplane that are simply breaking too much,” Bogdan said, likening the situation to a game of Whac-A-Mole.

When asked for specific examples, Bogdan brought up the tires on the F-35B short takeoff/vertical landing model designed for the Marines.


Tires for other jump-jet designs need more buoyancy to handle the weight of the plane coming straight down to land. But when taking off on a runway, the tires need durability — the opposite characteristic.

Because of that dichotomy, the B model is burning through tires at an unsustainable rate. So Bogdan has asked tire-manufacturer Dunlop to develop a better tire, a process that he said would not cost the US government anything.

 

[tomahawk6]

AESA radar making the F-35 obsolete ?

http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-NOTAM-140909-1.html

 

[Haletown]

AESA radar making the F-35 obsolete ?

http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-NOTAM-140909-1.html

No.