Lockheed Martin’s F-35: What Is Left To Fix?
The Joint Strike Fighter: progress and problems.
Lara Seligman -
Aviation Week & Space Technology (Jan. 6, 2017)
Lockheed Martin’s F-35 achieved its first international deployment and the U.S. Air Force declared its first squadron ready for war in 2016, but the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) also suffered key setbacks last year.
The world’s most expensive fighter program continues to grapple with technological challenges.
The latest version of the JSF’s internal logistics system is delayed by several months, and operational test pilots are still seeing stability issues with the warfighting software.
The Joint Program Office (JPO) has righted a quality issue with the avionics cooling lines that temporarily grounded 15 operational aircraft, but Lockheed is now racing to fix the 42 in-production aircraft that were affected.
Further, the services are dealing with fallout from two aircraft fires this year and recent issues identified in testing.
At the same time, tensions are high between Lockheed and the Pentagon.
After failing to come to an agreement on the long-awaited ninth batch of aircraft, the government in a rare move unilaterally issued a contract valued at $6.1 billion for 57 jets.
The two parties are still working on a handshake agreement for Lot 10, which they had hoped to reach this fall.
Meanwhile, although many of the international partners will move forward with a three-year bulk purchase of the aircraft starting in 2018, the U.S. military will not.
Designing the world’s most advanced fighter does not come cheap.
The JPO is racing to finish the F-35’s development phase - already at $14 billion since the 2011 program restructuring - but the Pentagon is preparing for a delay of up to seven months past the planned completion date and projecting additional cost growth of $530 million.
And the $14 billion is only a fraction of the full bill: a July 2016 report from the Congressional Research Service pegged the research and development cost at $59.2 billion in fiscal 2012 dollars since the program’s inception.
Here we look at the F-35’s remaining challenges.
Stalled Contract Negotiations.
After 14 months of negotiating low-rate initial-production (LRIP) Lots 9 and 10, the government unilaterally issued Lockheed a contract for the ninth batch of F-35s.
This exceptional move is rarely seen in Pentagon contracting actions but may set a new precedent.
The government could move forward with a similar unilateral action on the anticipated Lot 10 contract, JPO Chief Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan noted at a media briefing on Dec. 19.
“Do I want that to happen? Absolutely not,” Bogdan said.
“We want to negotiate in good faith and come to a bilateral agreement with Lockheed, and we are going to try and do so.”
The JPO and Lockheed are set to begin negotiations again on Lot 10 this month.
The good news is the Lot 9 contract represents an overall drop in the average unit price, Bogdan said.
Including the engine and Lockheed’s fee, an Air Force F-35A costs $102.1 million, a 5.5% drop from Lot 8; a U.S. Marine Corps F-35B is down to $131.6 million, a 1.8% reduction; while a U.S. Navy F-35 is up to $132.2 million, a 2.5% increase, due to a decrease in Navy procurement quantities (see graph).
No Block Buy for U.S. Services.
Per expectations, most international F-35 partners will move forward with a three-year bulk purchase of aircraft in Lots 12, 13 and 14 beginning in 2018, Bogdan said.
As recently as September, he expressed confidence that the U.S. services would join in the block buy in its second year.
However, Bogdan said Dec. 19 that the JPO made a “strategic communication mistake” in characterizing the services’ plan as a block buy, explaining that the U.S. will instead contribute money to buy long-lead parts in bulk during the three years.
The services have already budgeted for the additional funding, called an “economic order quantity,” in their fiscal 2018 budget blueprints but must ask Congress to authorize the transactions each year.
The block buy will cover 451 aircraft and save about $2 billion altogether, Bogdan said.
ALIS Delays.
Lockheed had hoped to deliver the latest version of the F-35’s critical logistics system, the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS), by late November.
But it missed that deadline and is now aiming for February or March due to ongoing challenges with integrating the Pratt & Whitney F135 engine into the system, Bogdan said.
An internal diagnostic system that tracks each part of each aircraft worldwide, ALIS is crucial to efficiently maintaining and managing the fleet.
The most updated version, ALIS 2.0.2, is planned to automatically include maintenance data from each aircraft’s engine.
This will ease a burden on maintainers, who currently need to have that data transferred manually from Pratt specialists, who first pull that information off the aircraft.
However, this capability will not be delivered to the warfighter for a few more months because of software difficulties in migrating Lockheed and Pratt data at the supply chain level, Bogdan explained.
The F-35 can still fly without the latest version of ALIS - even into combat. ALIS is a ground-based system that provides sustainment and support but not combat capabilities.
Using an older version of the logistics system just means that maintainers have to take that extra step to track maintenance and manage daily squadron operations when it comes to engine data, Lockheed says.
It also means a squadron would likely need to bring Pratt’s current maintenance infrastructure in addition to the ALIS system on any deployment.
Ongoing Software Challenges.
The JPO and Lockheed spent months in 2016 resolving a bug with the F-35’s interim software load, Block 3i, that caused the aircraft’s system to seize mid-flight and have to be rebooted.
Now the test team is seeing the same problem with the final warfighting software, Block 3F, which will enable the full-up aircraft to deploy critical weapons.
Although operational aircraft outfitted with the fixed 3i software are seeing shutdown events only every 15-20 hr., test aircraft are experiencing the problem after less than 10 hr., Bogdan said.
These glitches do not cause the aircraft to fall out of the sky, Bogdan stressed, as most of the systems on the F-35 are “triple redundant.”
Instead, the pilot must recycle the individual systems until they begin working again.
This kind of problem happens “all the time” with any software-intensive aircraft, Bogdan emphasized.
“F-16s, F-22s, F-18s, at some point in time when flying have computer glitches and malfunctions that require resettings, it’s just a matter of how often that happens,” Bogdan said.
He says he is not worried about the problems with the 3F software, because the program office and industry successfully fixed similar issues with 2B and 3i.
Weapons Integration Challenges.
Weapons integration, including external weapons such as the short-range air-to-air AIM-9X Sidewinder missile, is central to the final Block 3F software load.
But integrating the AIM-9X has been challenging; recent testing revealed “load exceedances,” or excess stress, on the F-35C variant’s wing structure during landings or certain maneuvers.
This is a serious issue, Bogdan acknowledged, but it is being resolved.
The JPO has engineered and ground-tested a fix, which involves beefing up the structure on the inside portion of the wing, and will flight test the solution in January.
Retrofitting the fix onto the aircraft is “simple,” Bogdan said, because the outer wing of the C variant comes off “like a piece of Lego.”
This makes it relatively easy for maintainers to remove the faulty portion of the wing and install a new part.
Putting Out Fires.
The danger with beginning to buy and use an aircraft still being developed - so-called concurrency - is that unexpected problems can crop up during operations.
The JPO is still dealing with fallout from two operational aircraft fires in 2016, as well as an isolated quality escape issue with the JSF’s avionics cooling lines that grounded 15 F-35As in the fall.
The most recent mishap occurred Oct. 27 when a fire broke out on a Marine Corps F-35B during a training flight at Marine Corps AS Beaufort in South Carolina.
The root cause was a loose bracket designed to hold the electrical wires in the bay.
As a result of that loose bracket, the electrical wires began to chafe and set off the spark that caused the fire.
The incident was reportedly a Class A mishap, which involves damage of more than $2 million.
The JPO is retrofitting the fleet with a new, redesigned bracket, Bogdan said.
Because not all B-model aircraft have been modified with the fix, pilots are flying with increased levels of risk, he acknowledged.
Just a month earlier, an F-35A also caught fire as it was preparing for a training mission at Mountain Home AFB, Idaho.
The fire was quickly extinguished and no serious injuries occurred.
The service is still investigating the root cause of the incident, but initial assessments point to a tailpipe fire due to strong tailwinds as the engine was starting.
Meanwhile, all 15 F-35As that were grounded last September due to loose insulation discovered in the wing fuel tanks are flying again.
Lockheed is still fixing the 42 in-production aircraft that were affected by the problem though, which has slowed down the production line.
The company had planned to deliver 53 aircraft this year but will deliver just 45 as a result of this delay.
At-Sea Testing Discoveries.
Finally, the program also is making adjustments due to discoveries during several recent periods of at-sea testing of the F-35B and F-35C variants, Bogdan said.
Marine Corps and Navy operators still are experiencing problems with the helmet’s display system during night flights in which the symbols on the screen are too bright and can blind the pilot.
The JPO does not yet have a permanent fix and may need to make some “operational changes” in the short term while pilots wait for a long-term solution.
“When you are driving your car at night and you are on a really dark road, you know that little button over here that can change your dashboard’s light? Sometimes you can turn that thing up too much so that your dashboard is glowing, and when you are looking at the dashboard and you look up the light is blinding you,” Bogdan explained.
“We have a similar issue with the helmet. You want to turn down that helmet symbology so that it’s not so bright so you can see through it to see the lights, but if you turn it down too much then you start not being able to see the stuff you do want to see.”
The JPO also is working through a problem with the Navy F-35C variant in which the aircraft’s nose appears to bounce up and down as it catapults off the aircraft carrier.
This is primarily because the mechanism in the nose gear is not “damping out” the oscillations from the cable release quickly enough, Bogdan explained.
This problem only occurs with aircraft at very light takeoff weights, he stressed.
“That’s why we do testing, that’s why we have a development program, that’s why we’re going to keep going until we get it right,” Bogdan reiterated.
