Two Japan policy experts have written an excellent piece for the Japan Times on the F-22 export issue. The idea of exporting F-22s to Tokyo was thought to have died two years ago, but suddenly revived in the past six weeks even as the F-22 production line's survival is in doubt. But the Japan Times op/ed suggests the ongoing debate may be driven as much by domestic politics in Japan as any security issues. 

Hurdles to a Japanese F-22

By WESTON S. KONISHI and ROBERT DUJARRIC

Special to The Japan Times

North Korea's return to saber-rattling has brought military affairs back to the top of the Japan-U.S. agenda. As many Japanese continue to have -- unfounded -- doubts about the commitment of the Obama administration to the bilateral alliance, they are pushing for Washington to allow Japan to purchase America's most advanced fighter aircraft, the F-22 Raptor.

CLICK HERE TO READ FULL STORY

When F-35 program executive Brig Gen David Heinz last month said that he does not believe that "Pratt feels compelled to act as though they are in competition", I did not know what to make of that statement. So I asked two of Pratt & Whitney business development executives yesterday how they interpreted it. The answer became the basis for a news story that will be posted on Flightglobal.com later today.

The F-35 program holds suppliers to standard learning curve theory. This predicts that suppliers become more efficient as production rates grow. According to the theory, a 100% learning curve means costs will never decline. The supplier essentially has to re-learn the production process with each new unit. The F-35 program expects suppliers to achieve an 88% learning curve. This rate projects that costs will fall by 12% every time the production rate doubles. 

According to P&W's executives, the F135 is "about halfway" between the 88% standard and the 100% level -- so about 94%. This means that the projected cost savings for doubling the production rate will be less than 12%, but I'm not sure by how much.

A "blue ribbon" panel created by Heinz accepted two weeks ago a plan by P&W to achieve the 88% learning curve benchmark over a period of years. The plan will require some additional upfront costs.

It's not clear how this will affect the debate about funding an alternate engine for the F-35 -- the General Electric/Rolls-Royce F136. The F136 is about five years behind the development of the F135. Its first production order is not scheduled to come until next year, if Congress decides to insert $600 million in the budget to pay for them. The GE/Rolls team has not yet faced the pressure of keeping yearly production lots for the F136 on an 88% learning curve.

But the issue may help explain why Heinz has become an outspoken advocate for promoting the principle of competition within the F-35's supply chain.

Northrop Grumman now has two flying prototypes for the MQ-8B Fire Scout unmanned helicopter. The first, P6, flew a year ago and is dedicated to ship-based demonstrations. Meanwhile, a surprise Northrop press release issued about 15 minutes ago announced first flight of a second prototype, P7. (Sorry, the first flight photo won't be released until at least tomorrow.)

The latter prototype will be dedicated to the Fire Scout's land-based mission. It will demonstrate the range and capability of the surveillance mission, compliance with the US Army's AAI One ground control system and also emerging missions such as battlefield re-supply.

I also asked one of Northrop's Fire Scout executives in quick interview moments ago about competitive pressure. Boeing's A160 Hummingbird has been picked up by the US Special Operations Command and is being pitched to the US Marine Corps, among other operators. Does Northrop need P7 to keep the otherwise dormany army Fire Scout program competitive?

"If I told you it was independent [of competitive pressure] you'd say, 'You liar,' and there would be some truth to that," the Northrop executive said. "We're very pleased with the maturity and progress with the Fire Scout system. ... There's a maturity that's been achieved in the program others don't have."

Mandy Smithberger, an investigator for the Project on Government Oversight, has posted the first summary of the F-22 stealth fraud lawsuit. She concludes: "If the allegations are true, the justification for the whole program may be in question."

Here's more:

This of course is not the first time that the real and practical capability of the stealth of the F-22 has come into question. Just last February, POGO reported that the maintenance requirements for the stealth capability significantly reduced the F-22's mission capability. As we said at the time, we believed that this may have been one of the primary reasons why then-Defense Department Acquisition Chief John Young said that the F-22's mission capable rate was too low to waste additional taxpayer dollars on further procurement.

Lockheed Martin has been sued by a former engineer who claims the company knowingly supplied defective stealth coatings for the F-22, according to the legal document posted below. I'm following up with the former engineer's attorney and Lockheed Martin for further comment.

[UPDATE 1: The lawsuit was filed by the attorney for Deepwater whistleblower Michael DeKort, who writes on CGreport.com that he helped Darrol Olsen file the lawsuit about the F-22.]

[UPDATE 2: I should note that Darrol Olsen and the attorney are seeking "all appropriate" damages. According to the whistleblower statute, that includes re-instatement and restored seniority, two times the amount of back pay lost plus interest and compensation for attorney's fees. Olsen says in the lawsuit he was dismissed by Lockheed in 1999 for "failure to follow instructions".]

[UPDATE 3: Olsen's attorney is traveling in Europe. I am holding off on a news story until I can speak with him. Check for updates here either later tonight or early tomorrow. So far, Lockheed Martin has no comment.]

[UPDATE 4: Click here to read Flight's news story. The document shown below is a draft copy of a lawsuit expected to be filed later this week. It was posted prematurely on the web by a consultant to Darrol Olsen's lawyer, Samuel Boyd.  
Olsen Complaint

This post is written by Will Horton, Flight's Washington, D.C. intern.

Sunday night the National Geographic channel premiers its documentary "Hitler's Stealth Fighter".

Hitler? Stealth? Fighter?

Modern stealth aircraft design did not start until the 1970s, but this documentary aims to find out if Nazis Germany developed stealth techniques three decades earlier.



In the Battle of Britain during the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe's advantage in numbers was matched only by Britain's use of radar technology. The Nazis knew of Britain's radar development, albeit not how far developed it was, and needed to re-gain their advantage.

Luftwaffe Chief Hermann Göring came into contact with aircraft builders and enthusiasts Walter and Reimar Horten. The Horten brothers, as they are known, wanted to build an aircraft that could fly with the "elegant efficiency of birds". They developed the 2-29 (also known as the HO IX), a tailless "wing flyer" that revolutionarily incorporated the engines within the fuselage, rather than have them protrude below wings.


This futuristic aircraft is described as being the "most exotic piece of machinery in Germany at the time" and having an "unearthly shape".

With the engines buried in the fuselage, exterior surfaces blended together, and plane constructed almost entirely out of wood (possibly to prevent radar from penetrating the skin, or possibly because Germany was facing a resource shortage), it's easy to look back on the 2-29 with hindsight and say the Horten brothers were developing a stealth fighter to subvert British radar, but we don't know for sure.

"Were they thinking of radar?" a Northrop Grumman employee asks. Northrop, best known for highly capable and ultra-modern defence products like its B-2 stealth bomber, decided to find out.

Teaming up with documentary producer Michael Jorgensen--who was fascinated by the 2-29--engineers in Northrop's model shop spent three months in 2008 building a full-scale model of the 2-29 to conduct the first ever radar deflection test. Of the two aircraft constructed during the war, one was never finished and the other crashed during a test flight.

At one hour with commercials, the documentary has a few repetitive moments. While the information and various interviews are excellent, it barely skims the surface of an aircraft it acknowledges could have had major consequences for the world. Those not aviation-inclined will likely find the program sufficient while others will want to know more.

The documentary follows the Northrop engineers build the model, almost entirely out of wood, true to the original. It is ironic to watch these engineers, who normally work on projects they "can't talk about", build a plane out of wood using primarily glue and nails to hold it together. You could be forgiven for starting the documentary mid-way and thinking it was about seventeenth-century shipbuilding.


But therein lies the fascinating part: this relatively unknown aircraft had the potential to change history. The Nazis planned to have an atomic bomb by 1946 and wanted to use it to strike America. Based on the 2-29's design, the Horten brothers developed the 18, an aircraft that would have six jet engines across its 142-foot wingspan (a 757's wingspan is only 124 feet). The 18 would presumably have been Germany's Enola Gay; the documentary's only farfetched moment is when it depicts a mushroom cloud erupting next to the Statue of Liberty.

The team finally takes the model to Northrop's radar cross-section test range in Tejon, California. Propped up on a five-story tall pole, the model is rotated while exposed to the same type of radar used by Britain during World War II.


The results (spoiler alert!) are scary. From the time most Luftwaffe planes appeared on British radar they could reach their target in 19 minutes. The 2-29, aided by its speed and stealth, could reach its target in only 8 minutes. "It would have been a game changer," one Northrop engineer says. The 2-29 would have permitted just 2.5 minutes to respond.

While the documentary's conclusion that the 2-29 pre-dated modern stealth capabilities by three decades is fascinating, equally so is the insight to so-called black programs and the people who work on them. "After 28 years working in the dark, it's nice to spend one day in the light," one engineer says of his time working on the 2-29 model. At the classified radar base, a man who tows the 2-29 model out of its hangar says without the slightest bit of laughter, "I've moved a lot of stuff, but I've never moved a German stealth fighter."

Presumably the "stuff" he has moved is top-secret and highly classified, the pride of the most sophisticated engineering programs in the world, the same programs that were thought to develop stealth technology.

"Hitler's Stealth Fighter" airs Sunday, June 28, at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the National Geographic Channel in the US.

I've been calling around all day to find this out, but so far no luck. Maybe somebody reading the blog can help me. I am reliably informed that NAVAIR received six bids for the STUAS/Tier II contract when the solicitation period closed on 9 June. I know for a fact that bids came in from AAI Corp with the Aerosonde Mk 5, Boeing/Insitu with the Integrator and Raytheon/Swift Engineering with the KillerBee-4.

I strongly suspect bids were submitted from UAV Dynamics (a new General Dynamics/Elbit Systems joint venture) with an unknown aircraft and Aurora Flight Sciences (possibly partnered with Northrop Grumman) with the Golden-Eye 80.

So who is the mysterious sixth bidder? I have three guesses: BAE Systems with a recently acquired Advanced Ceramics Research aircraft, Lockheed Martin with a Skunk Works-developed vehicle or Stark Aerospace/Israeli Aircraft Industries (IAI) with another aircraft.

Who wants to make a guess?

The Air Force Times' Sam LaGrone reports that a key Senate committee has authorized the Pentagon to spend $1.7 billion for 7 F-22s in Fiscal 2010.  A House committee last week authorized to Pentagon to spend $360 million to buy long-lead parts for 12. Both version still face a vote from the full House and Senate, then reconciled in a joint conference. The Senate's reported action comes a day after the Obama Administration threatened to veto the bill if more F-22s were added. Two Congressman from Massachusettes are also seeking to block F-22 funding in the House version of the bill.

READ THE FULL AIR FORCE TIMES ARTICLE HERE.

Canadian journalism students got access to Pentagon contract data after buying a possibly stolen Northrop Grumman hard drive in a market in Ghana, according to the CBC. Here's excerpts from the story below:

"You'd think a security contractor that constantly deals with very secret proprietary information would probably want to wipe their drives," [Blake] Sifton said Tuesday.

He visited Ghana for 10 days in February with classmates Heba Elasaad and Krysia Collyer and Prof. Dan McKinney while making the documentary Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground for an international reporting course.

...

Special skills or software weren't required to access the data, said Peter Klein, who teaches the international reporting course and supervised the documentary project.

"We plugged them in and started reading files .... They were just sitting there."

Northrop Grumman declined to be interviewed by the students, but said it was looking into how the hard drive got to the Ghanaian market, and asked the students to return it, which they did not.

The US Air Force today announced a $276 million contract that buys three Bombardier Global Express business jet and five powerful new communications relay systems.

The latter is the Northrop Grumman Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN). This payload is designed to translate data messages sent by radios with incompatible waveforms, perhaps alleviating one of the military's most persistently annoying problems. A BACN has even demonstrated the ability to link the F-22's exclusive intra-flight data link with non-stealthy aircraft, such as the E-3 AWACS.

Nothrop is required to install the payload on three Global Express jets and two RQ-4B Block 20 Global Hawks. This mini-fleet of communications relay aircraft must be ready for "sustained deployment through 2015".

The contract marks a major coup for Bombardier, which has previously sold the Global Express as a military aircraft only for the UK's R1 Sentinel ASTOR. Northrop had originally partnered with Gulfstream for BACN, but the partnership broke apart around the same time that Boeing and Gulfstream teamed up in a losing bid to win the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) deal.