F-35 schedule: it's complicated

Figuring\nout the Lockheed Martin F-35 program can sometimes be like whack-a-mole.

First\nflight of the short-takeoff-vertical-landing (STOVL) BF-1 aircraft on Wednesday\noffers a good example. Did the milestone event occur on schedule, as Lockheed\nand program officials claimed, or did it not?

Well, that\nall depends. It was supposed to fly on May 23^rd, so you'd think it\nactually occurred 19 days late. But an engine problem identified several months\nago was expected to delay first flight by 30 to 60 days. By that reckoning,\nLockheed actually delivered 11 to 41 days early.

But perhaps\nwe're just being nit-picky. After all, Lockheed's schedule for BF-1s first\nflight was set 18 months ago. What do a few days here or there really matter?

Falling\nwithin three weeks of the original target was certainly enough to impress Doug\nPearson, Lockheed's VP for the F-35B's integrated test force.

\"I've never\nseen [a first flight] predicted 18 months ahead of time and then taken place on\nthat date,\" he told reporters.

(Pearson,\nby the way, should know. Before he was hired by Lockheed, Pearson commanded the\nair force's flight test center, and personally cleared Lockheed's F-22 for\noperations. More trivia: Pearson was the F-15C pilot in 1985 credited for shooting\ndown a satellite with a specially-built missile.)

On the\nother hand, a more cynical observer (blush) might point out that the F-35's\nin-service remains delayed by 18 months, and BF-1 was originally supposed to enter\nflight test eight months ago.

But that\nisn't the only complication. Sure, BF-1 entered flight test more or less on\ntime (according to the revised schedule). But the rest of the developmental\naircraft have just been hit by a completely new delay.

I\ninterviewed Dan Crowley, the F-35's executive vice president and general\nmanager, yesterday. About two weeks ago, the program rolled out the third major\nupdate to the F-35's master schedule called 6.1. I originally reported this proposed\nschedule change in March.

This revision\nshifts delivery dates across the board for the rest of the 19-aircraft\ndevelopmental fleet by approximately three to five months. It gives Lockheed's\nfinal assembly plant some needed extra time to build the aircraft, and the timing\nfor the delay is based on actual manufacturing flow data accumulated so far.

The big\ndifference between this major schedule revision and the last one is that it only\nchanges the system development and demonstration (SDD) phase, not anything else.\n

The timing\nof the low-rate initial production phase and the flight test phase has been\ncompressed, but both are still scheduled to end at roughly the same time as\nbefore.

As an\noutsider observer, it's difficult to understand how Lockheed is going to make\nthis work.

Crowley points out that he expects the F-35\nflight test phase to go much faster than previous test programs. He believes\nthe F-35 will start out as a far more reliable and stable platform, and\ntherefore can be cycled faster. He also notes that the development and\noperational testing phases could be combined, which should also shorten the qualification\nprocess.

Of course, flight\ntests by their nature can be unpredictable. And it's difficult to imagine a\nmore complicated and challenging program than the F-35, which must qualify\nthree different variants and perhaps two different engines.