F-35 makes headway

By David Alexander
ABOARD THE USS WASP, Nov 25 (Reuters) - The 16-ton fighter jet slowed to a stop off the warship's port beam, where it hovered like a floating rock as thousands of pounds of thrust from its engine and lift fan stirred up a cloud of mist from the Atlantic Ocean 100 feet below.

After a brief hesitation, the sleek, new gray airplane - a Marine Corps version of the radar-evading F-35 Joint Strike Fighter - slipped quickly sideways over the amphibious assault ship and then dropped to the flight deck with a gentle bump.

"It's just an incredible feeling to have that kind of precision control over that kind of power," Lieutenant Colonel Matt Kelly, a test pilot, said after watching a fellow flier land the jet during recent sea trials of the warplane. "It's a pilot's airplane to fly. It does what the pilot wants it to do."

The smooth test performance contrasts with the rough ride the F-35 development program has had, thanks to cost overruns and production delays, since it first began to take shape more than a decade ago in the secretive advanced projects labs at the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin.

Critics say the F-35, which comes in three variants, is an ill-conceived multipurpose aircraft that tries to do too many things and will ultimately excel at none. Its stealthy fuselage and high-tech systems, some say, are so complex to build and maintain they will inevitably make it unaffordable.

But advocates view the aircraft as a war-fighting platform for the networked, iPad generation that will revolutionize the way America fights.

"This airplane will give the United States and its allies tremendous capability for years and years, decades and decades to come," said Alan Norman, Lockheed's chief test pilot for the jet. "It gives us that quantum leap in capability that allows the pilot to really think about and dictate what he wants to do in the airspace."

First, however, it must survive budget cuts in Washington. Because the United States is trillions of dollars in debt, Congress has already ordered $450 billion in defense budget reductions over the next decade and may demand more as it tries to pare another $1.2 trillion in projected federal spending over 10 years.

The failure this month of Congress' "super committee" to reach a deficit-cutting deal could trigger automatic budget reductions beginning in January 2013, including an additional $650 billion of security spending. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has issued dire warnings about such reductions.

The F-35, the Pentagon's costliest weapons program at $382 billion, is a logical place to look for savings, especially since it started as a program to build an affordable jet but has ballooned in cost almost from its inception.

The Marine Corps version of the aircraft tested on the USS Wasp is under threat of cancellation, and the Air Force and Navy, which have their own variants, may have to scale back the number of planes they purchase in an effort to economize.

Lockheed officials privately concede the United States may not buy all 2,447 jets currently planned.

"Clearly it's on probation, even in the minds of top Pentagon officials because of the technological hurdles that it hasn't cleared and the spiraling costs of the program," said Chris Hellman, research director at the National Priorities Project, a left-leaning nonpartisan think tank.

"At a moment in time where ... they're going to have to come up with some substantial savings in their budget," he said, "it's sort of a prime target for deficit reduction."

DARPA AND SKUNK WORKS

The F-35 program began in the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as an effort to develop technologies for a successor aircraft to the Marines' AV-8 Harrier jump jet, with its short takeoff and vertical landing capabilities first developed by the British military.

DARPA sought assistance from Lockheed Martin's "Skunk Works" research lab - the brains behind the Cold War-era U-2 spy plane and the stealthy F-22 Raptor, the only so-called fifth-generation fighter currently in service worldwide.

Some military services also wanted an aircraft that could do everything from close-air support to air-to-air combat, enabling them to replace several aging planes with a single jet. Congress merged the programs in the mid-1990s.

Lockheed Martin beat out a Boeing proposal and on Oct. 26, 2001, was awarded an $18 billion initial contract to develop its plane.

A key goal was affordability. Multiple supply chains could be eliminated by using the F-35 to replace a diverse set of aircraft, from the F-16 and AV-8 Harrier to the F/A-18 and A-10 Warthog.

Use of many common parts among the three versions would help reduce costs, as would having a single maintenance supply system for all the services instead of one for each.

Further efficiencies were sought by bringing allied partners into the project, a move meant to improve interoperability and lower costs in multinational operations. Eight other countries eventually joined the program and others plan to buy and field the aircraft.

But the program quickly ran into technological challenges. Development horizons lengthened, costs rose and the total aircraft buy shrank.

"The problem is built into the DNA of the airplane," said Winslow Wheeler, an analyst at the Center for Defense Information, noting that the F-35 was conceived by DARPA as a short-takeoff, vertical landing aircraft, an idea that was then imposed on Navy and Air Force notions of a multi-role fighter.

"Layer on top of that a third level of complexity derived from stealth. ... That complexity makes it an illusion that anybody can get the cost of this thing to a level that's affordable," said Wheeler, a staunch critic of the plane.

The initial estimated cost of developing and purchasing 2,866 of the aircraft was $231 billion, with the services expected to start flying it between 2010 and 2012, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Seven years later, officials now expect it will cost $382 billion for 2,447 F-35s, an increase of about 64 percent.

Lockheed expects the F-35 to cost about $65 million once the plane is in full production. With the jet currently only being built in small batches, the GAO estimated earlier this year it cost about $133 million per airplane.

The military services are not expected to put the plane into service until 2015, and the estimated cost of building and maintaining the fleet of aircraft over its lifespan of more than 30 years has risen from $589 billion in 2005 to about a trillion dollars now.

RISING COSTS, GROWING FRUSTRATION

Rising costs and production delays at a time of growing fiscal constraints in Washington have led to frustration with the program at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill.

After a program review last year, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates put the Marine Corps version of the plane on two years probation, saying it should be canceled unless technical and production problems could be fixed.

He also delayed production of 124 planes over two years, dashing Lockheed's hopes of ramping up assembly and gaining economies of scale that would help drive down costs.

Senator John McCain, a sharp critic of the F-35 overruns, nearly won approval in June for a measure that would have killed the entire program if its costs were 10 percent above the target price at the end of 2012.

"We have to fix the weapons acquisition culture ... in the Pentagon that allows this continuation of over-cost, overspending," he told the Reuters Washington Summit. "It's a culture ... that allows us to have the first trillion-dollar weapons system -- the F-35."

With Congress looking for ways to trim projected spending, some have asked whether one of the variants should be cut.

General Martin Dempsey told the House Armed Services Committee last month that having "three variants ... creates some fiscal challenges for us" and wondered "whether we can afford all three."

Hellman said he wouldn't be surprised if one F-35 variant was terminated - probably the Marine Corps version due to its technical challenges - or a 30 percent to 40 percent reduction in the number of aircraft purchased.

"We're already buying Joint Strike Fighters. We'll continue to buy Joint Strike Fighters. The question is how many and which kind," he said. "I do think it's on Panetta's short list if he has to start pulling rabbits out of his hat for deficit reduction."

Those scenarios worry Lockheed, which is counting on the F-35 for about 20 percent of its revenues.

Marine Corps General James Amos, whose service needs the vertical-landing version for its short-decked amphibious assault ships, is still fighting to fund the aircraft.

"To do the things that our nation requires of the Marine Corps, we need this airplane," he said.

FLEET CONTINUES TO GROW

As the budget debate intensifies, Lockheed continues to build and hand over a growing fleet of F-35s to the military. One hundred and seventeen of the aircraft have been delivered or are on order.

The first plane for an international partner -- the United Kingdom -- rolled off Lockheed's Fort Worth production line Sunday evening. And with more planes in the air, the F-35 program has completed its flight-test targets for 2011.

More and more pilots have had a chance to fly the plane. Many of them like what they see.

The Marines' Kelly, who has flown the F-35 to 1.2 times the speed of sound and conducted aerial maneuvers that put up to seven times the force of gravity on its airframe, said he found it similar to the Boeing F/A-18 fighter he regularly flies.

The difference is in the F-35's integrated electronics.

While the military upgrades electronics on its older jets, the chance to design a new plane let them go back to the drawing board and integrate the sensors in a way that multiplies their impact - like having an iPhone instead of a separate cellphone, music player and Internet browser.

The result, pilots said, is a quantum leap in capacity.

"There is no comparison between an F-35 and an F-18 in terms of war-fighting capability," Kelly said. "The avionics and the radar, the sensors and the ability to precision target your weapons in a stealth platform is something the F-18 just doesn't do, just can't do."

(Photo credit: Reuters/David Alexander (F-35 lands aboard the USS Wasp in October)

November 25, 2011

F-35 makes headway amid criticism, US budget crunch