U.S. Air Force F-35A Lightning II aircraft assigned to the 421st Expeditionary Fighter Squadron taxi on a runway in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility on July 25 (U.S. Air Force Photo)
By Frank Wolfe |
1 year ago |
09/06/2023
highlights
Lockheed Martin [LMT] said in an 8-K Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing on Sept. 6 that the company expects to deliver the first F-35 in a Technology Refresh-3 (TR-3) configuration between April and June next year.
“As a result, we now expect to deliver 97 aircraft in 2023 (all in the TR-2 configuration), which we do not currently anticipate will impact our 2023 financial outlook,” the 8-K said. “We are producing F-35s at a rate of 156 per year and expect to continue at that pace while simultaneously working to finalize TR-3 software development and testing. Additionally, we remain focused on receiving the necessary hardware from our suppliers to deliver this critical combat capability for the F-35. The number of 2024 F-35 deliveries will depend on when the first TR-3 aircraft is delivered and the time needed to complete the customer’s acceptance process. We continue to assess impacts to 2024 and will have updates as the test plan continues.”
In April, U.S. Air Force acquisition chief Andrew Hunter told the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) that building more than 156 F-35s per year for the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps and foreign nations would require new tooling (Defense Daily, Apr. 26).
“We’ve been working closely with Lockheed Martin on production capacity,” Hunter told the SASC’s airland panel in response to a question from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “Right now, they would be very stressed to produce at a rate beyond that [156 annually]…If we wanted to go to a higher production rate, we would probably have to increase tooling, and one of the significant limiters there is the center body piece.”
Northrop Grumman [NOC] builds the F-35’s center fuselage and BAE Systems the aft fuselage.
Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Rheinmetall AG, and German officials broke ground on Aug. 1 on an F-35 center fuselage Integrated Assembly Line in Weeze, Germany near the Düsseldorf-based Rheinmetall.
Rheinmetall said that the Weeze plant will, starting in 2025, build at least 400 F-35A center fuselages (Defense Daily, Aug. 4). DoD has been buying the tri-variant F-35 for more than 17 years–the first F-35A rolled out of Lockheed Martin’s Ft. Worth plant on Feb. 19, 2006, but DoD has yet to approve full-rate production for the fighter–an approval that could mean a rate of 80 F-35As per year for the Air Force.
U.S. allies “are a huge component of the [F-35] program,” Hunter told SASC in April. “Since the conflict in Ukraine was initiated by Russia, we’ve had many additional partners and allies make the decision to purchase the F-35.”