March 2010 Archives

The fact that an unidentified B-1B bomber pilot stuck his neck out this morning isn't news. After all, B-1B pilots fly a non-stealthy aircraft with a defective defensive suite. What else do you expect?

But this B-1B pilot stuck his neck out by challenging the chief of staff of the air force on a fundamental point of the service's strategy. Namely, the pilot asked, since stealth is so expensive, why don't we do something else?

Gen Norton Schwartz, to his credit, did not reward the pilot's boldness with an automatic Article 15 disciplinary action and a reassignment to the Adak weather station. Instead, Schwartz heard him out.

What if, the B-1B pilot suggested, the air force equip non-stealthy aircraft, such as the B-1B, with high-energy lasers? The pilot cited the example of the Electric Laser on a Larger Aircraft (ELLA), which involves exactly such a concept. If such non-stealthy aircraft could be more cost-effective than a stealthy platform, could that change the paradigm?

Schwartz wasted no time making clear such a concept would never happen -- not during his own tenure, nor the B-1B pilot's. Why?

"There are those who would say that 'I'm very comfortable being shot at because I can sort of interrupt the process. I feel comfortable with that scenario,'" Schwartz says. "Well, frankly, I'd just as soon not be shot at."

Who says only the Israelis can rock a marketing video?

Lockheed Martin Aeronautics house band Into the Blues All Stars does its best late-90s power-rock imitation in this new marketing video posted by the company on YouTube today. This might be the first arms industry advertisement I've seen that could double as a rock video.

Spotters, take note. Lockheed included what might be a never-seen-before clip of a simulated F-35C catapult launch.

The US Air Force dispatched the F-22 earlier this week to the Chilean air show FIDAE. I normally look for hidden agendas as the F-22 trots around the globe -- ie, is the Dubai appearance a show of force to Iran? Is the Paris no-show a political snub? Etc. But I think the Santiago show is a case where the official pretext overwhelms any unofficial subtext, if you will. So just sit back, relax and enjoy the show! Thanks to williamacro for posting video on YouTube. 

We invite you to nominate the winners for the 2010 Flightglobal Achievement Awards. The award categories include aviator, innovator and leader of the year. Flightglobal also invites nominations for lifetime achievement and the Boeing-sponsored engineering student of the year. The 2010 winners included Chesley Sullenberger (aviator), Richard Branson (innovator) and Bob Mitchell (leader). Deadline for nominations is April 6.

Feel free to name your candidates in all five categories on this blog, but please submit your official nomination form today.  

An apoplectic Rep Frank LoBiondo yelled at Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter during an armed services subcommittee hearing yesterday. Normally, lawmakers ask the witnesses questions, but LoBiondo wasn't asking for a response. He appeared to just want to vent. LoBiondo represents a New Jersey district that includes an F-16 base operated by the Air National Guard.

And, now, for something completely different, a Chinese military affairs expert explains  why the Lockheed Martin F-35 program faces cost and schedule problems.

The headline in the Communist Party's English-language newspaper says: "F-35 fighter has become clumsy white elephant". The piece, labeled a commentary, is question-and-answer job with Chen Hu, editor in chief of the World Military Affairs magazine. Chen concludes the F-35 "has become an oversized monstrosity capable of doing nothing". Other excerpts:

GT: Why have the F-35s become so expensive?

Chen: ...The US military has often suffered financial losses because of the pursuit of versatility. Because manufacturers in the US are not owned by the state, they are used to producing complicated technology for more profits.The best way for them to profit is through entirely new models of aircraft, not gradual reform, which drives them into aiming for large-scale integration and producing multi-functional hardware. Another plane, the F-111, initially designed as an "all-round fighter", finally turned out to be useless.

GT: What does the US need to do now?

Chen: ... Some large-scale military hardware projects, like the F-35, seem to be nothing more than fishing trips designed to test the waters for new equipment and make as much money as possible.The original plan held up the F-35 as being less expensive, but that's fallen through. Since the research company wanted to pursue the maximum profit, it is impossible for them to set the price of new generation aircraft at the same level as old ones. The original price for the F-35 is $50 million. After the F-22 was withdrawn, the price of the F-35 was inevitably pushed higher and higher.

GT: What China can learn from this experience?

Chen: The experience of the F-35 is meaningful to China. Lots of countries are engaged in building fourth-generation fighters. Should we copy the US pattern, or work toward our own needs? Russia has designed their own fourth-generation fighter, the T-50, which is not exactly the same as the F-35 or F-22. The US requires that their own fighters can be used globally and are equipped with offensive functions. China, as a developing country, doesn't have the same demands.

The Ides of March is past. The end of the month approaches. On the Department of Defense's fiscal calendar, the third quarter starts in only a week.

That means we're one week away from another mysterious delay on the US Navy's schedule to award a small tactical unmanned aircraft system (STUAS)/Tier II contract.

In December, the Navy postponed contract award from the first quarter of Fiscal 2010 to the second quarter. That was after delaying contract award from the fourth quarter of FY2009. And that was after postponing the original plan to award the US Marine Corps Tier II contract in August 2007, which allowed the USN to join the program and dramatically change the requirements.

Barring some programmatic miracle, I anticipate the USN will announce a further delay or something even more dramatic within the next few days. 

For such a relatively small contract (sub-$500 million -- peanuts in DOD acquisition terms), STUAS/Tier II is a strangely huge headache to decide.

Given so many unexplained delays, you have to wonder if any of the four bidders are considering options for protesting the decision (if there ever is one) to the Government Accountability Office.

The DEW Line is pleased to offer a three-part video showing a fascinating (albeit poorly-lit), 1hr lecture on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, presented last week by Skunk Works engineer Paul Bevilaqua at Johns Hopkins University's applied physics laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. 

Bevilaqua is credited with the invention of Lockheed Martin's shaft-driven lift-fan, the core technology allowing the short-takeoff-vertical-landing (STOVL) F-35B. The first part of the lecture is below, and click on the jump to view the other two parts.

The eight-year-long saga to build a replacement for the US Air Force KC-135 has already produced a few surprises, but nothing as crazy as this.

A Los Angeles-based attorney, who lists hot-tubbing with a glass of bordeaux as a hobby and known mostly as the editor of a best-selling book compiling love letters of great men, is fronting a new bid for the KC-X contract based on the Ilyushin Il-96, a four-engined airliner and cargo transport never previously (to my knowledge) operated as a tanker.

Can this competition possibly get any stranger?

Last year, the US Air Force reported incremental unit procurement cost to buy one more F-22 in Fiscal 2010, assuming a 20-aircraft multi-year contract. The cost was $138 million.

At the time, the F-35 seemed like a bargain by comparison. The official cost estimate, unchanged since 2007, pinned the average procurement cost for the F-35 between $60-$90 million, depending on the variant.

Those assumptions for the F-35 now look almost ridiculously rosy. The Department of Defense released a document today revising the F-35 cost estimate by up to nearly 90% [read full story].

We now know the F-35 will cost between $114 million to $135 million, adjusted for inflation. That average cost assumes the US Air Force will still buy 1,763 F-35As despite plans to draw-down to a total of 2,000 fighters, including 186 F-22s already on order.

For the money, F-22 doesn't seem like such a bad deal anymore, does it?

The Skunk Works design for what became the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter evolved over a decade. A very early sketch showing an F-117-like faceted airframe had changed radically by 1990.

The "GhostHawk STOVL Strike Fighter" sported a configuration that included canards and a wing with a forward-swept trailing edge.



Unfortunately, Skunk Works destroyed the documentation for the classified GhostHawk concept after the DARPA-sponsored program terminated. When the US Marine Corps and US Air Force launched the Joint Advanced Strike Technology (JAST) program a few years later, Skunk Works was forced design a whole new airframe. This time, the configuration would be based on the F-22, which had recently entered development.

F-35 "inventor" Paul Bevilaqua shared these details and images yesterday evening during an F-35 history lecture hosted at the Johns Hopkins applied physics laboratory in Laurel, Md. The public event provided a whole new look at the genesis and evolution of Skunk Works' various concepts, ultimately leading to the X-35 prototypes and the three F-35 variants itself. Bevilaqua proved an engaging speaker, sprinkling his lecture with fascinating anecdotes and even a few pointed jokes, such as this one:

"There are three variants of the Joint Strike Fighter now. Several people have asked for additional variants. And the marines have asked if we could take out the lift fan and put in a seat for a congressman."

I will be posting a three-part video recording of Bevilaqua's lecture later today or early tomorrow.

Robbin Laird's Second Line of Defense blog has a fantastic interview with the ">Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) program office. Laird, a well-connected military analyst and writer, found out the Increment 1 SDB hasn't been used in Afghanistan and Iraq for nearly three years. The US Air Force has instead developed a new version of the Increment 1 munition to make the SDB useful in close air support operations. [Read full interview.]

"Lt Col Kato: First of all, some of the operations weren't in urban environments where low collateral damage mattered. In fact, some of the missions needed a bigger boom, so 500 and 2,000-lb JDAMs were better weapons of choice for the targets that they were prosecuting. 

Secondly, because it's designed as a stand-off weapon, it takes a long time to get there because the way it was developed is that it was intended to maximize its glide slope so that it could get the maximum range.

And there was the question of time to target. The pilot says, "Okay, released."  And the guy on the ground says, "Okay, how long?"  And he says, "Four and a half minutes."  And the guy says, "What?" In a CAS fight, that's not good, that's not the best option if you're the guy on the ground having to clear air space while troops are likely in contact with the enemy for that long.

Today was a very big day for the F-35 program. It's true that the first vertical landing of a F-35B flight test aircraft is merely another test point, one among thousands. But it's a really big, single test point.

And, most importantly, it's a rare moment of victory after a six-week series of very public setbacks. Since February 1, we have learned the program is at least 13 months further behind schedule, initial operational capability for the US Air Force will come another two years later, and the cost of each aircraft now averages more than $100 million.

The vertical landing itself occurred about nine to 10 months later than the latest previous schedule, and a couple years late compared to the original schedule.

But the event also shows that Lockheed is making progress, albeit ever so slowly. It is not insignificant that the BF-1 flight test aircraft has flown three times in two days. Each aircraft is expected to average 12 sorties per month at peak rate. It will be at least another year before Lockheed proves the 14 aircraft in the test fleet can demonstrate the flight test sortie rate achieved by previous programmes, including the F-22 and F/A-18E/F.

At that time, Lockheed executive vice president Tom Burbage told reporters today, "we'll be able to get a really good lock on whether we can achieve these kind of legacy type rates, and we think we will."

EADS executives continue to decline comment on whether the company wants to submit an independent bid for the KC-X contract after Northrop Grumman's decision on 8 March to withdraw from the competition.

But one thing is now absolutely clear: It is "impossible" for EADS to submit a bid before the May 10 deadline imposed by the US Air Force request for proposals, EADS Chief Executive Louis Gallois told reporters this morning at a breakfast roundtable in New York City.

At first, Gallois said it would be "almost impossible" for EADS to meet the deadline. But he quickly clarified that the 60-day window rules out any opportunity for the company to prepare a new response to the current RFP.

Next time Russian air force modernization comes up to justify more spending on US fighters, please consider this article by RIA Novosti military commentator Ilya Kramnik. No matter how badly the so-called "fighter gap" grows in the US tactical aircraft inventory, Moscow's problem is even worse, as Kramnik describes.

Kramnik forecasts the USAF will reduce its fixed wing and helicopter fleets from 5,000 to 3,000-3,500 over the next 10 years. Of those, 1,700-2,000 will be combat aircraft.

Russia's Ministry of Defense has signed a flurry of recent fighter orders, but even those don't dramatically change the overall picture, as Kramnik writes.

The Russian Air Force now has about 2,800 aircraft, including nearly 1,500 warplanes. The air fleet is expected to decline still further. Virtually all un-modernized aircraft will be scrapped at the end of their service life.

Consequently, the Air Force will have some 1,500-1,700 fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters, including only about 800 combat-ready warplanes. The number could increase if additional state defense contracts are awarded. Options are currently being considered.

Is this enough or not? The industrial world, including Russia, the NATO countries and the United States, continues to scale down its air forces. This is an objective process. The number of newly procured aircraft does not equal the number of planes currently being decommissioned, most of which were built in the 1960s, the 1970s and the 1980s.

Such reductions are motivated by some objective factors, including the end of the Cold War and plunging industrial world defense spending (relative to GDP), and subjective factors, including vastly superior modern combat equipment efficiency rendering it unnecessary to replace older aircraft one for one.

Unmanned air systems (UAS) will prove they belong in the same airspace as passenger jets in 10 years, the White House says.

The 10-year roadmap quietly last week last week by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is not quite the UAS equivalent of Brown vs the Board of Education (Editor: Ahem, not that airspace integration and school desegregation are even close ). But it is the first White House-level document establishing UAS airspace integration as a policy goal.

The FAA today candidly discriminates against UAS technology in national airspace. It's not even a separate but equal policy today; it's just separate.

The new objective to integrate the national airspace is one of several goals contained in the document, entitled the National Aeronautics Research and Development Plan 2010. It is dated February, but was released on the OSTP web site on March 4.

The Avascent Group proposes a few rules for defense companies eyeing adjacent markets as military budgets level off or decline.

1. It's okay to offer a new capability to an existing customer, and
2. It's okay to offer an existing capability to a new customer, but
3. It's never okay to offer a new capability to a new customer

Class dismissed.

It wouldn't surprise me if Eurofighter thinks politics -- and not performance -- will decide who wins India's mega-fighter contract. But it does surprise me that somebody actually said it. India is currently judging the six competitors on technical performance, with a downselect leading to an analysis of economic benefits.

StratPost blog editor Saurabh Joshi today quotes Matthias Schmidlin, who leads Eurofighter's pursuit in India.

"The final decision at the end of the day will be political. We all know that. This is, at the moment, the largest defense contract around the globe. And it will be the largest fighter, combat campaign for the next decade to come. So clearly, this is very strategic for all the vendors in the campaign."
Acknowledging the contestants would have to satisfy the technical and commercial evaluations before getting to a point where they can be decided upon politically, saying, "Every vendor needs to go through the compliant bid up to that point."

Schmidlin also thinks the Eurofighter has the advantage of the political inheritance it carries from Europe. "Once we are at this last and final stage: the political element, I'm convinced that the German government is fully committed behind this campaign," he says.

Boeing's today announced that the first customer for production A160Ts will be ... itself.

Designed by Predator inventor Abe Karem, Boeing acquired the optimum speed rotor-powered A160 in 2005. Ten developmental A160s have been built for two customers so far -- the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Special Operations Command.

With the development stage now complete, Boeing had hoped to attract new orders for the record-setting aircraft, which remains the only unmanned helicopter to record an 18hr flight.

But the orders have not materialized. So Boeing decided to fund production of 21 white tail A160s, which the company can offer to sell or lease for military or civil operators starting in early 2011, says Ernie Wattam, program manager for the Boeing A160T Hummingbird.

Building production aircraft on speculation is rare in the manned military aircraft industry. But the concept has proved popular among manufacturers of unmanned air vehicles. Boeing's Insitu subsidiary also independently developed the smaller ScanEagle and Integrator UAS before selling the aircraft to various international militaries. 

As its name suggests, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute tends to frown on arms sales anywhere. With that disclaimer in mind, SIPRI's annual report and continuously updated database are indispensable tools in the public domain. The latest report released today expresses SIPRI's predictable concerns about a five-year surge of arms sales activity from 2005-2009. The organization notes that arms transfers spiked in regions with some of the world's poorest countries, such as South America (up 150%!) and South Asia. Combat aircraft paced overall demand, accounting for 27% of the value of all arms transfers over the past five years.

Download report

[Quick note: Thanks for everyone's patience, understanding and condolences over the past week. You guys -- and all of you seem to be guys, by the way -- have been so supportive. Now, it's back to the grind!]

Can the US military rotorcraft industry build anything besides the UH-60 Black Hawk, AH-64 Apache or CH-47 Chinook?

A new report by Forecast International predicts the time is ripe to launch development of a new helicopter. I've heard this for a few years, and there are increasing signs that the interest is real. But I still don't know where the funding comes from, unless the army wants to sacrifice near-term modernization funding to invest in a risky development project.  Here's an excerpt from the Forecast report:

Among the emerging trends in this market that are identified by the Forecast International study is a new emphasis by the U.S. military on technology innovation and new product development.  In recent years, rotorcraft procurement by the U.S. military services has mostly been of improved derivatives of already-existing helicopter types rather than all-new, clean-sheet designs.  In response, U.S. manufacturers have generally evolved their military helicopter product lines around these requirements.  Jaworowski says, "In many ways, the U.S. military has the domestic helicopter industry for which it has been asking."  Concerns about the stifling of innovation within this industry, though, have in part prompted the Pentagon to launch a number of initiatives intended to kickstart research and development efforts.

I just want to let everyone know that I'm on leave this week because of a death in the family, so there will be no updates here for a few days.

The US Army received its 100th UH-72 Lakota yesterday with an atypically lavish delivery ceremony. Dignitaries gathered inside the EADS North America hangar on the outskirts of Columbus, Mississippi, included Governor Haley Barber and even his wife. A real Lakota Indian chief attended (er, with apologies to General Custer), and he fully endorsed his tribe's namesake helicopter. Piles of fried catfish were served up after the ceremony -- this is, after all, Mississippi.

But who could blame the army for wanting to celebrate a little?

One former officer was overheard afterward noting an astonishing fact. No new helicopter series ordered by the army had reached the 100-aircraft delivery mark in more than 20 years. Also, not least, the ceremony occurred exactly on schedule -- and for the price the army originally agreed to pay! In my decade of aerospace industry coverage, I can think of only one other major program managing this elusive trick. Take a bow, Boeing EA-18G Growler.

Unlike Boeing's Growler program, EADS had the advantage of delivering a helicopter that is limited to civilian airspace. The UH-72 is not certificated or designed to operate in combat. As I noted yesterday, that puts an asterisk on the UH-72 achievement.  

But EADS still faced a big challenge, and one that has proved perilous for several aerospace companies. EADS has delivered all 100 UH-72s from a "green-field" factory. Where a planned 53 UH-72s will be built this year, there was literally a green field in the Eastern Mississippi flatlands four years ago. The Columbus area now boasts a micro-aersopace cluster, including EADS, Aurora Flight Sciences and Stark Aerospace. But there was hardly any aerospace industry presence in the area when EADS moved here in late 2006.

Building a successful green field site is not a trivial accomplishment. If Northrop Grumman/EADS North America win the KC-X contract, or a share of it, Airbus must replicate that success and stand up an A330-200 final assembly site in Mobile, Alabama.

How did EADS manage this feat?

The UH-72 experience reveals a patient, three-phase approach that heavily leveraged Eurocopter's existing assembly line in Germany. Only now, in fact, are UH-72s being fully produced at Columbus, with nearly one-third of the army's projected deliveries complete. 

Eurocopter first established a "light assembly line", which covered the first 40 aircraft. These aircraft were fully assembled in Germany, shipped to the US and customized for the army customer. The second phase began in mid-2008. EADS opened a "full assembly line" in Columbus. Germany still assembled the airframe and installed the wiring harnesses, but Columbus added the avionics and mechanical systems. Starting in October 2009, EADS launched a full-up production line in Columbus. The first aircraft completely built in Mississippi will be delivered in a couple of months, which is slightly behind the schedule EADS gave me in September 2007. 

Early tomorrow I board an airplane to Columbus, Mississippi. A proud community, Columbus boasts the birthplace of playwright Tennessee Williams and the world's largest toilet seat factory. It also happens to be the manufacturing home of the UH-72 Lakota, a beachhead for EADS' North American expansion.

I'm going down south because EADS has invited journalists to attend a ceremony tomorrow morning marking the 100th UH-72 Lakota delivery to the US Army. (It doesn't hurt that EADS North America CEO Sean O'Keefe will also be there, and my colleagues and I have a few questions to ask him about a certain tanker competition.)

But I also want to know something about the UH-72 program. Few helicopter contracts awarded over the last decade have been so successful. EADS has delivered all 100 UH-72s on time and on budget, which is so unusual that it's almost newsworthy. Alas, the achievement comes with an asterisk. The UH-72 remains the only non-training helicopter in the Army's inventory that can't be deployed into a combat zone.

In an attempt to save money and speed up a replacement for the UH-1 Huey, the army didn't ask for a militarized helicopter.

More than two years ago, an EADS executive told me it's only a matter of time before the army reconsiders the militarization requirement. In the meantime, EADS has teamed up with Lockheed Martin to adapt the UH-72's civilian airframe -- the EC145 -- into the armed and militarized AS645 scout helicopter.

Few armies have the luxury to operate a fleet of hundreds of non-combat-ready helicopters. It remains to be seen whether the US Army will stay as the outlier -- or will finally militarize the Huey's successor.

The Lockheed Martin F-22 production line is dead, dead, dead. The US Air Force won't buy any more and foreign customers can't by any more. The age of Raptor production is over; long live the Lightning II.

Or, is it?

Rand's Project Air Force today published a 120-page monograph titled: Ending F-22A Production: Costs and Industrial Base Implications of Alternative Options.

Hold on. What "alternative options"? Didn't we already decide the F-22 is dead -- no ifs, ands or earmarks?

Rand's analysts explain in their report that the study was commissioned by the US Air Force before the decision was made to terminate production.

Some might wonder why Rand didn't think to simply cancel the study after Congress approved the termination order, but let's leave that aside for now.

Rand's analysis calculates the costs of restarting production after a two-year hiatus, producing 75 "zombie" F-22s (zombie=back from the dead) between 2012 and 2016. The study concludes that the average unit cost for the 75 F-22s is $227 million, including re-start costs. The average flyaway unit cost, which exclude re-start costs, is $179 million.

We have published a news analysis on Flightglobal.com with my findings after reviewing the hundreds of pages of monthly assessment reports on F-35 production released recently by the Defense Contract Management Agency.

A quick summary:

US government auditors monitoring the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme have warned that Lockheed Martin expects delays of aircraft deliveries will continue for at least another year. The Defense Contracts Management Agency (DCMA) also has expressed fears Lockheed Martin will never fully recover, citing parts shortage trends indicating the F-35 assembly line in Fort Worth, Texas, "will not be able to achieve or sustain [full] rate production".

The reports show Lockheed's biggest manufacturing problem is the F-35's wing, a fact the company has long acknowledged. Here's more from the story.

Severe shortages of parts have forced Lockheed to send incomplete wings to a mating fixture, which joins the four major wing structures to the fuselage. Even after the missing parts arrive, finishing the wings inside the mating fixture is more difficult, which extends the delay.

Lockheed has previously said that many of the parts shortages were caused by the 2004 redesign. As part of an effort to save up to 1,360kg (3,000lb), Lockheed introduced stricter manufacturing tolerances knowing many suppliers would need several years to achieve them.

The reports are a wealth of data. Here are some highlights, including several points that didn't fit inside the news story.
 

• July 2007: Five potential suppliers rejected Lockheed's design for the F-35A gun port access panel, each calling Lockheed's design too complex to manufacture.
• July 2007: The Honeywell integrated power pack failed on the test stand, even as the AA-1 flight test article was already grounded. The DCMA noted these examples, along with "risks associated with concurrent development, elevate concerns and jeopardize [redacted] the flight test program schedule."
• August 2007: DCMA found that Lockheed "is not following, nor consistently applying [earned value management system, or EVMS] guidelines". The report adds: "The utility of EVMS has declined to a level where it does not serve its intended purpose and the government is not obtaining useful program performance data to anticipate and mitigate program risks."
• December 2007: "There is a high risk of not meeting the 400hr system level mean-time-between-failure requirement by the end of [system development and demonstration, or SDD]. As risk mitigation, [redacted] had budgeted methods of 'growing' reliability earlier than originally planned, but cost constraints resulted in LM Aero canceling the Reliability Growth Tests. These tests were the primary vehicle for improving MTBF during SDD."
• December 2008: "Seat anomalies were observed in the ejection sequence during an escape system sled test on 20 Nov 08, with two successive failures occurring during subsequent qualification testing. An investigation revealed that the ejection seat sequencer failed to function properly and the ejection seat operated in back-up mode. Data indicates a communications fault during sequencer power-up -- bench testing has shown that the sequencer is fully functional following the communications fault."
• December 2008: DCMA raised concerns about Lockheed's monthly spending rate, projecting the SDD budget will be depleted by Fiscal 2011.
  
• April 2009: "Present supplier delivery data/trends indicate LM Aero will not be able to achieve or sustain rate production of F-35 aircraft assembly, manufacturing sequence or DD-250 delivery dates."
• July 2009: "The Program has surpassed one year since the revised Program Master Schedule (6.1), which established an Over Target Baseline for cost and schedule, was implemented. An initial improvement in overall SDD planned versus actual activity completion performance was observed in May 2008 when MS 6.1 was implemented into the schedule. Over the last seven months, performance has averaged an approximate 40% completion rate. ... MS 6.1 does not appear to be achievable - there is a strong probability of Master Schedule realignment (MS 6.2?) currently under consideration."
• September 2009: "The volume of major [change requests, or CRs] is projected to continue. While much of this volume was anticipated within the program, the number of major changes and the disruption to the floor were not anticipated. ... Change as a result of design errors, assembly issues and integration issues were not anticipated as they have been seen."

Analyst James Hasik, author of Arms and Innovation, yesterday posted a remarkable blog red-teaming a future without the Lockheed Martin F-35. You need to set aside several minutes to read through the logic, but it's well worth it. Some key excerpts:

In the United States, the leadership of the USAF and the USMC see no clear alternative to simply continuing to pour whatever money they must into the program. (The Navy is an exception, and I'll get to that below.) But the US has a further problem: the airplane is not just joint, it's international. Like the International Space Station, the JSF is still stumbling along in part because it's too international to deorbit.

Hasik also looks at all the world's fighter industrial base, and finds them overwhelming aligned towards rooting for the F-35's destruction.

In short, most of the combat aircraft industry would arguably like to kill this thing, and the rest is at best dispassionate.

Perhaps Hasik's harshest comment:

The JSF is just not militarily vital. Several years ago, I asked the head of strategy at a European aircraft manufacturer why his company had no obvious plans for a fighter beyond the current model. "All our customers," he said, "have enough fighters for chasing Cessnas for the next fifty years."

Rather, Hasik envisions a future without the F-35 program. F/A-18E/F Super Hornets team with X-47Bs. The US Air Force and US Marine Corps start from scratch to develop a fighter that can be employed against China's post-2020 fighter and air defence technology. For, the international partners, maybe it's business as usual, with the Gripen, Rafale, F-16 and F/A-18 continuing to compete with each other. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit yesterday at Sukhoi's offices has yielded some excellent footage of the T-50 cockpit and what appears to be a static airframe.

All photos and videos were posted earlier today at DefenceNet, a Russian-language web site. By the way, if you can read Cyrillic, please help me translate.

The cockpit shows two side-by-side, roughly 15-in multi-function displays with a massive head-up display.

 

You probably thought when Secretary of Defense Bob Gates killed the Lockheed Martin F-22 last year, it was a good thing for the F-35. I'm not so sure anymore. I think Gates simply shifted everyone's target. As the MOST EXPENSIVE WEAPONS PROGRAM IN HISTORY, Lockheed's F-35 program, with its nearly $11 BILLION ANNUAL PRICE TAG (and that's only the US-funded portion), faces F-22-like scrutiny, but now with an unprecedented level of public disclosure.

I spent most of my day reading the 25 reports posted by the Defense Contracts Management Agency (DCMA), an unexpectedly public archive that tramples all over the proprietary secrecy usually reserved for aerospace assembly lines.

The DCMA's disclosure is an extraordinary and unprecedented gesture. Sure, many pages are redacted, but, even so, I do not believe that a major weapons program has ever faced this level of exposure.

How do we interpret all of this data? Carefully.

DCMA reports, by their nature, have to be a bit unfair. DCMA's auditors aren't looking to provide a balanced perspective. The monthly action reports are about finding problems -- and fixing them. That said, the DCMA reports show the F-35 has been having more problems than even some of its critics realized, and they haven't been getting fixed either. It will take me another day or two to process all of it.

Meanwhile, the F-35 data dump keeps rolling.

Ashton Carter's office has released an acquisition decision memorandum on the F-35 that postpones full-rate production 13 months. It adds another year of low-rate production, plus adds four jets to the flight test program, including one new carrier variant and three converted low-rate production aircraft.

Last, but not least, a scathingly critical report on the F-35 program has appeared in Holland. Johan Boeder, a software entrepreneur who tracks the global F-35 supply chain on Saturdays and evenings, has posted an English-language briefing on the F-35. Boeder first presented the brief two weeks ago before the standing defence committee of the Dutch Parliament. His findings are worth reading.

Five years ago, the Boeing X-45 and Northrop Grumman X-47 dueled for US Air Force and Navy contracts worth billions of dollars under the long-defunct joint unmanned combat air systems (J-UCAS) program.

The J-UCAS program is dead but the picture above shows how the X-45/X-47 competition lives on.

Boeing has released a new photo showing the Phantom Ray -- a company-funded descendant of J-UCAS. The unmanned demonstrator is scheduled to begin a series of 10 test flights in December.

Phantom Ray is designed to carry a 4,500lb payload in two internal bays, with the option of two 2,000lb JDAMs or an intelligence sensor (either a synthetic aperture radar or electro-optical/infrared). The aircraft could be applied to a variety of different requirements, Daryl Davis, president of Boeing advanced systems, told reporters. A scaled-up and optionally-manned version could be offered for the US Air Force's long-range strike requirement. The demonstrator above might provide the USAF a replacement for the Predator/Reaper family, he says.

Meanwhile, the other former J-UCAS competitor is also expected to enter flight test in December. Northrop's X-47B has a contract worth more than $1 billion to demonstrate that a stealthy, tailless planform can land autonomously on a carrier deck. The X-47B will also participate in autonomous air refeuling trials.

Boeing also has submitted the Phantom Ray to the Department of Defense as a candidate for demonstrating that a unmanned air vehicle can be refueled in-flight, Davis says.

If anything, maybe it means the billions of dollars spent on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's series of J-UCAS in the first half of the last decade won't be wasted after all.

What did Boeing Advanced Systems President Daryl Davis think when the US Air Force revealed the existence of the RQ-170 Sentinel a few months ago -- particularly since his unit is working its own stealthy unmanned air system (UAS) called Phantom Ray?

Davis gamely attempted today to answer that question on a teleconference call with reporters about the Phantom Ray.

"The best way to say that is that I was fascinated by that," Davis says.

But Davis was mindful the RQ-170 program's capabilities and even its appearance remain classified officially, although several photos of the aircraft seem to have trickled into the public domain.

"We know very little about it. I can't comment on it," he says.

However, after a slight pause, he seemed to find a route to make his point.

"If I looked at Phantom Ray compared to some of the pictures I've seen," he says, "we're a much cleaner airplane and I would -- well, I'll stop right there."

Shucks.

Watch this space for new Phantom Ray photo coming soon.