Lockheed Martin's F-35: blemished on three fronts

There is an old joke in the software industry: a new product can be on time, it can be on budget, or it can work properly - pick any two. The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II is blemished on all three counts, and the US government thinks it knows why.

"Concurrency" is the latest culprit for the F-35's acquisition and development challenges. In acquisition parlance, concurrency means the development phase overlaps with the production phase. The government decides, at programme start, to order hundreds of production aircraft, years before development problems are discovered and fixed - and then pays to retrofit redesigned parts on aircraft delivered late because changes complicated the manufacturing process.

Why does the government adopt a concurrent schedule? In theory, it should allow the military to get new weapon systems into operational service much sooner. Linear schedules allow the contractor to finish development before shifting into production mode. For decades, the US Government Accountability Office has advocated that the Department of Defense adopt this approach with new weapon systems. However, the DoD has nearly always ignored the advice.

Every major combat aircraft programme in modern history, including the F-22 and F-15, has had highly overlapping development and production phases. Even commercial programmes, where limiting financial risk is prioritised, have concurrent schedules. Hence, Boeing has built dozens of 787s, but the first one has yet to enter scheduled service with All Nippon Airways.

Two DoD studies - published in 1988 and this year - have examined concurrency and found no correlation with cost or schedule growth. The most recent study actually found concurrency is most likely to decrease risk of cost growth in major weapon systems.

The real problem with concurrency seems to concern what happens, not at the beginning of the programme, but at the end. When production is stopped short by hundreds of aircraft, the level of concurrency risk appears much higher than was assumed when the programme's acquisition plan was approved. The F-22 may be the perfect example. When the plan called for buying 750 aircraft, buying several dozen production aircraft during the development phase did not seem so unbalanced. When the numbers were cut to 187 F-22As, the concurrency risk seemed unacceptably high.

This mismatch between plans and execution is the root of the problem, and the F-35 is paying the price.

[This piece originally appeared as the Flight International leader in our 8 November issue].