By Marina Malenic
ORLANDO–Development and testing delays in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program have caused Air Force officials to doubt that the aircraft will be ready for deployment by 2013 as currently planned, a senior service official said last week.
“We’re taking a look at and re-evaluating our [initial operating capability] date and what our definition of that is,” Gen. William Fraser, the head of Air Combat Command, told reporters during a Feb. 19 briefing at the Air Force Association’s annual symposium here.
Pentagon officials said earlier in the week that the system design and development (SDD) phase of the effort will be 13 months behind schedule following a program restructure. The SDD phase will now continue until 2015–two years after the current Air Force IOC date for the F-35A conventional take-off and landing (CTOL) variant.
“Whenever there are adjustments to any program, you’ve got to go back and take a look at whether all the requirements are still going to be met by timeframe X or Y,” Fraser said.
“The IOC focus is on combat capability, not on a date,” he added.
To that end, the Air Force is examining how the new timeline will alter aircraft production numbers, spare parts and training capacity by 2013. Fraser did not say how soon a new IOC date might be formulated.
The Marine Corps and Navy, which are currently scheduled to achieve IOC on the short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) B variant and the carrier C variant in 2012 and 2014, respectively, did not respond by press time to questions on whether those dates are also in question.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates earlier this month announced an F-35 program shake-up, with a new three-star program manager still pending appointment. Prime contractor Lockheed Martin [LMT] was also punished, with the department withholding $614 million in fees. Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz said earlier in the week that the F-35 program is in danger of breaching a congressionally mandated cost-growth cap (Defense Daily, Feb. 19).
Speaking at the same conference, Lockheed Martin officials acknowledged that they are six months behind in delivering test assets to the military and three to six months behind on developing the software package. Officials said they planned to remedy these schedule slips by making additional infrastructure and personnel investments in F-35 software development and adding additional test aircraft to the fleet. Steve O’Bryan, Lockheed Martin vice president of F-35 Business development and customer engagement, told reporters that the company is spending “hundreds of millions of dollars” to get the program back on track.
The president’s Fiscal Year 2011 budget request calls for $10.7 billion for F-35 development and for the purchase of 43 aircraft.
Delivery of new F-35 aircraft to the Air Force under the revised testing and acquisition schedule will come just in time as the service plans to divest itself of aging F-16s, Schwartz has said. He has described the pending replacements as “nose to tail.” Fraser said last week that the air service plans to continue maintaining and upgrading its aging F- 16, F-15 and A-10 fleets to mitigate any potential shortfall to some degree but did admit that a “gap” in needed capabilities would occur if the F-35 IOC date does indeed slip.
Lockheed Martin is developing the three F-35 models to replace 13 types of aircraft for the U.S. Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy, as well as allies including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey and the United Kingdom. Israel is said to be in final negotiations on a purchase.
Late last year, the Pentagon acknowledged that its special assessment team once again found that the program faces significant cost increases.
The Joint Estimating Team’s latest cost projection for the program has indicated that the $300 billion program may end up costing the government some $16.6 billion more than budgeted. And the latest annual report from the department’s director of Operational Test and Evaluation says that the program continues to face “substantial risk” over the next two years.
Meanwhile, the third of five F-35B Joint Strike Fighter short takeoff/vertical landing test aircraft was delivered to Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., by Lockheed Martin last week. The jet, known as BF-3, will be used primarily in evaluation of vehicle systems and “expansion of the aircraft’s aerodynamic and structural-loads envelope,” according to a statement released by the company.