Unlike Julius Caesar, the JSF program will survive March. However, it may suffer a couple more wounds to go with those received earlier this year. The Pentagon’s Selected Acquisition Reports (SARs) will be released and are likely to show a critical breach of Nunn-McCurdy cost-escalation limits, leading to a mandatory program review. Also, the Government Accountability Office is due to issue another report on the program. Given the program leaders’ cavalier dismissal of GAO’s earlier warnings, it is likely to be harsh and seasoned with “we told you so.” Before or around that time, another schedule slippage is almost certain.
Under Nunn-McCurdy, if a program’s estimated unit-procurement costs exceed 150% of what was planned at the outset (or “rebaselined” before 2005), the program must be recertified. This means the Pentagon must confirm that it is essential, costs are reasonable and management is in control of costs. The Pentagon also has to provide Congress with the costs of an alternative solution to the requirement—all within 60 days of notification.
The strongest warning yet of a Nunn-McCurdy breach came in a Jan. 19 letter to suppliers from Tom Burbage, executive vice president of the F-35 at Lockheed Martin, and Dan Crowley, Lockheed Martin’s second-most-senior JSF leader. “We are working closely with the U.S. government to avoid a Nunn-McCurdy critical breach if possible,” the letter reads, “though these calculations are subject to factors beyond [our] control, including escalation indices, propulsion costs and the degree to which independent estimates are used for SAR forecasts.”
The last two qualifications are crucial. Propulsion-system costs are still high, and the Pentagon’s plans to cancel the F136 alternate engine from General Electric and Rolls-Royce have been blocked. And since recent independent assessments—from the Navy, the director of operational test and evaluation (DOTE), and the Joint Estimating Team (JET) formed to investigate the JSF program—have been negative, and the program’s repudiation of the 2008 JET report proved premature, it’s almost certain they will be taken into account in the SAR.
The program’s public tone is unworried. Burbage and Crowley assure suppliers that the JSF is “making solid progress.” They say static testing has been completed successfully for the F-35A and F-35B versions, and near- and far-field tests of the full-scale radar cross-section test article are going to plan. Avionics tests demonstrate “unprecedented software stability,” and CATBird tests successfully demonstrated sensor fusion between the radar and electronic warfare systems.
The letter also states that successive system development and demonstration (SDD) test articles (19, including non-flying structural and other test airframes) have been built with less travel work—tasks performed out of sequence—and been more complete at rollout.
These are encouraging statements and projections, but neither reflect visible progress nor sit well alongside the January DOTE report.
Flight testing continues to slip, not only against the current official schedule (which reflects a one-year delay in completion of development testing, and was established in early 2008) but against predictions in September 2009, which called for five more aircraft to fly and the first vertical landing to be performed before the end of last year. Only one test aircraft flew (AF-1, which made two sorties), and the path to vertical landing did not start until January, when BF-1 engaged its lift fan in flight.
The Burbage/Crowley letter says “all development airplanes are expected to be delivered to the flight-test centers over the next year.” But last September, that milestone was due to be reached in the third quarter. AF-1, too, has been grounded for a long period after its first flights: It made three sorties in November, but at presstime had not flown for two months.
DOTE normally takes a critical attitude. The director, Michael Gilmore, reports directly to the Defense secretary. His office’s job is to find problems that have not been reported up the normal acquisition chain. That said, the January report was notable for the number of issues raised and the extent to which it disputed the program’s predictions.
Most important, DOTE predicts that the initial operational test and evaluation (IOTE) will be completed at least 18 months late, “in early to mid-2016.” Moreover, the report says only that this “could occur” if corrective action is taken immediately to extend SDD, add flight-test aircraft and if testing moves at an adequate pace. DOTE points out that the program accomplished only 16 flight-test sorties in Fiscal 2009 (discounting sorties flown by the non-standard AA-1 aircraft) out of 168 tests planned with full-up SDD aircraft. And although CATBird made 55 flights in Fiscal 2009, mission-systems tests started five months late, in March 2009.
DOTE warns of an upcoming problem: The IOTE task is supposed to be performed by the early low-rate initial production (LRIP) aircraft, but many of these will be ordered before flight testing and “the mission capability of the LRIP aircraft and support systems is unclear.”
One reason for this uncertainty is that the program predicts the delivery of functionality—what tasks the aircraft is equipped to perform—rather than performance, or how well they work.
DOTE reported that the completion of testing on all software blocks had been delayed by a year, along with the availability of the first F-35 with mission systems installed (BF-4).
Modeling and simulation, which the JSF team has touted as the secret weapon that will allow the project to be completed on time and on schedule, despite recent history, is at an early stage, says DOTE. The problem is that most of the labs and models have not been accredited—i.e., accepted as valid substitutes for aircraft testing. For this to happen, the report says, the lab performance needs to be verified by “hardware and software-in-the-loop ground and flight tests.” DOTE cautions against using models before they are ready.
DOTE cites a litany of problems, including more clutch heating discovered in last year’s hover-pit tests and software instability. The interservice JSF Operational Testing Team, according to DOTE, says the program “is on track to achieve operational effectiveness requirements but not operational suitability requirements.”
Thermal management remains a problem. The F-35’s systems are cooled by mechanisms that dump heat into the fuel, and a key element is a thermally efficient fuel pump—which circulates fuel at the required rates without adding heat to it—that has had development issues. The pump is to be installed on LRIP 2 F-35Bs and all F-35s from LRIP on.
Development work continues on the F-35’s ejection seat (DTI September 2009, p. 22) and the explosive Transparency Removal System, which is designed to separate the canopy transparency from its frame and break it along its centerline. Sled tests have revealed that as speeds increase the canopy segments do not “fly away” as planned (reportedly separating into shards), and so far the system has been cleared only to 450 kt. equivalent airspeed. A revised system is due to be tested this spring and to clear the aircraft to 550 kt. equivalent airspeed, “the current flight condition at which we have high confidence in the fly-away characteristics.” There is no word on when the system will be cleared to its 600-kt. equivalent airspeed design limit.
One source suggests that JSF may be running into high-angle-of-attack handling problems including “abrupt stall.” Lockheed Martin says that tests have allowed the designers to prevent such a problem “by incorporating design elements and developing fallback options, should the phenomenon appear during flight testing.”
But that flight testing is a long way off. F-35 high-alpha testing will not start before the fourth quarter of 2011—3.5 years after BF-1’s first flight and less than a year before the Marines are supposed to declare initial operating capability (IOC).
(In contrast, F-22 high-alpha testing started in August 1999, less than two years after first flight, six years ahead of IOC and before production aircraft had been ordered).
By early 2012, 185 jets are planned to be on order and advance procurement contracts should be signed for 156 more. And the predicted date is still two years out, from a program that hasn’t made a successful two-month prediction since 2008.
Another cloud on the horizon, says DOTE: “F-35C predicted takeoff speeds continue to increase and now exceed tire limits in hot and high-density-altitude environments.” One source calls the F-35C “a looming scandal,” separate from the dire predictions of operating cost issued by the Navy in January. Last month, Goldman Sachs downgraded Lockheed Martin stock from “neutral” to “sell.” “We expect 2010 to be a year of major challenges and constant negative headlines on the JSF program.” Say what you want about Wall Street, they called that one right, and it’s only February.
http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story.jsp?id=news/dti/2010/02/01/DT_02_01... Don't see how this is supposed to be better then the F-22, when they are having so many set backs, and not really making the progress that they should have been at by now.
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