Recently in Joint Strike Fighter Category

I'm calling today "F136 Day" because ... well, for me, it is.

I'm on my way to Cincinnati for a meeting this afternoon with the General Electric/Rolls-Royce program manager for the perpetually-imperilled alternate engine for the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF).

I've got to run to catch my bus, but I'll let you know how it turns out.

In the meantime, enjoy some background reading material on the engine here, and feel free to share your thoughts on whether you think the JSF program really needs two engines.

I don’t speak Dutch, German, Norwegian or whatever language is used in this song.

But this appears to be the very first protest song and video produced about the Joint Strike Fighter. It was posted on YouTube last week.

I’m assuming it’s a protest -- as opposed to a tribute -- owing to the big “X” across the picture of the JSF and the rather unhappy tone of the singer, whose musical oeuvre appears inspired by the vocal stylings of a Northern European Twisted Sister.

You be the judge.

For your weekend viewing pleasure:

Some people like to knock the Lockheed Martin F-22 for costing $140 million a piece, excluding all expenses for development and spares.

But not to worry! The next fighter coming along -- Lockheed's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter -- is supposed to be based on affordability, with a flyaway cost at roughly one-third of the F-22's price tag using 2001 dollars.

So, let's see how the F-35 measures up.

The US Navy and US Marine Corps plan to buy a total of 680 F-35Bs and F-35Cs over the next 15-20 years. The FY2009 budget contains budget projections for the remainder of the program. Note that this includes only procurement cost. Amortized development and spares costs are excluded.

Year Aircraft Average unit cost/aircraft

FY2008: 6 $184.2 million
FY2009: 8 $200.2 million
FY2010: 18 $172.3 million
FY2011: 19 $146.4 million
FY2012: 40 $124.4 million
FY2013: 42 $115.1 million
Remainder: 547 $109.3 million
Total: 680 $115 million

Mixed messages abound on the Lockheed Martin F-35 program today.

Overall it should be a good week for the F-35, with the first test aircraft back in the air after a seven-month hiatus and the second test aircraft due to be rolled out of the factory very soon.

But two articles appear in the press this morning that may darken the mood a bit in Fort Worth.

First, The Washington Post writes an article that strongly suggests the US Air Force and international customers should dump the F-35 and buy more F-16s.

Some skeptics have wondered why U.S. officials are investing nearly $300 billion to develop and buy the F-35 when the F-16, which costs about $40 million per jet, has proven so popular and easily upgradeable that 24 countries have bought them, many as repeat customers.

"There's a pretty good argument to keep building new F-16s forever," said Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow and military analyst at the Brookings Institution. "It's hard to say you can get a better bang for your buck."

It is an argument that could be made by a new administration in coming years, particularly if there is a recession.

Second, our worthy competitors at Aviation Week & Space Technology, quoted an unnamed retired Israeli general, who says:

Moreover, an influential retired IAF general says total sales will be limited by the JSF’s disadvantages. He points to its overdependence on stealth, a single crewman and what could be proprietary U.S. avionics.

“Eventually somebody will come up with a way to detect it,” he says. “A stealthy configuration also means you can’t carry additional weaponry on the exterior. The weapons system is more important than stealth. Israel will have F-35s, but not as many as we once thought.”

Smaller numbers won’t detract from the aircraft’s deterrence value, he concedes. Even a small fleet will ensure a first-day-of-war, surprise-strike capability. But once daily combat operations escalate, nonstealthy aircraft aided by standoff weapons, escort jammers and information operations will sustain air operations.

Nonetheless, he worries that the JSF will start showing its limitations within five years. Among the drawbacks will be its one-person crew. As a result, “we can’t operate the F-35 by itself,” the retired general says. “We really need two-seaters, with one person concentrating on flying and someone else focused on the strike mission. One man can’t take advantage of all the options,” particularly since JSF capabilities will include jamming, information warfare and network attack.

I've shamelessly stolen this video from The Woracle blog, but I had to. It's just that funny.

What gives you better bang for the buck: the F-22 or the F-35?

The answer will of course depend on the evolution of the F-35's price tag, so is probably unknowable for several more years.

But I'm glad that didn't stop Captain J. Michael Stelly, who has recently published his master's thesis for the Air Force Institute of Technology. The thesis is entitled "Price versus Performance: The Value of Next Generation Fighter Aircraft".

Assuming the F-35's price tag remains constant, he concludes the JSF is by far the more cost-effective purchase.

He claims that the F-35 shares every major weapons capability with the F-22 with one exception -- super-cruise, which is usually defined as the ability to fly faster than Mach 1 without afterburners. According to Stelly's models, this feature carries a relative value of $68 million per each F-22, making its somewhat slower rival a better overall affordable solution.

I'm not sure I completely follow this line of reasoning, but I think it's a worthy debate to have, and I'm glad Stelly has filled the factual vaccum with some empirical data to work with.

We knew that this contract award (see second item) last Friday looked like bad news for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), but it turned out to be even worse than we thought.

To cut to the chase, the contract was awarded because the F-35C's power generator was mistakenly designed to offer only two-thirds of the maximum electric output that the carrier-based jet needs. That means if the pilot needs to move all the control surfaces at the same time in a hard maneuver, he'd blow out the jet's electrical system.

In turn, that meant Lockheed Martin needed to get its subcontractor to redesign the power generator to provide 33% more electricity.

If that was the end of the story, then the design flaw would likely still be a tightly-held program secret.

The reason: the generator is made by Hamilton Sundstrand, a Lockheed subcontractor. Lockheed can privately contract with its subcontractor to fix a part, and nobody in the public ever has to be the wiser.

Fortunately, such a huge increase in power output meant that it wasn't just the generator that needed redesigning.

Pratt & Whitney happens to build the gearbox that transfers the power coming off the F135 engine into energy that can be used by the generator. Luckily, the US government contracts separately with Pratt for engine components on the JSF program, so it must publicly award a contract to Pratt to redesign the part.

That's where I come in. After such a mysteriously ominous contract award is announced, it's my job to call the companies to ask for an explanation. In my experience, Lockheed has always moved quickly to answer my questions, and -- thankfully -- they did so again this time, which allowed us to publish this news story in next week's magazine.

So -- thanks to Pratt's involvement in the program -- we all know about this serious design problem. But doesn't it make you wonder about all the things we don't know?

Try to follow the logic:

1: The Department of Defense submits a budget request in February, requesting to buy 12 JSFs -- 6 CTOL and 6 STOVL -- for $2.65 billion. (See page 26 here.)

2: The House Appropriations Committee passes its version of the defense budget on July 25. The lawmakers approve the Pentagon's exact request for 6 CTOL and 6 STOVL aircraft, which seems like good news for the program.

3: But there seems to be a catch. The House appropriators allocated only $2.41 billion to buy all 12 aircraft. That's $220 million less than the requested amount for the same quantity of aircraft, which is roughly the cost of one of the originally priced fighters.

4. So is it a typo, a clerical error? The guess here: no, it's a message. The House wants DOD to know that $2.6 billion is too much for 12 fighters, even at this early stage of the production program. The question is: will $2.4 billion really be enough, or is Lockheed going to get rolled?

[Full disclosure: a family member is a Lockheed Martin employee.]