PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. – If the United States decides to restart production of the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor, Pratt & Whitney, a division of United Technologies Corp. [UTX], estimates it could resume delivering F119 engines for the stealth fighter in about three-and-a-half years, a company official said May 31.
“We think we could restart the line,” said Matthew Bromberg, president of Pratt & Whitney Military Engines. “We’d have to do the formal study. We think if someone said ‘go’ today, we could have 119s coming off the line by Christmas of 2020, if it was needed.”
While Pratt & Whitney has not been formally asked to study a restart, it conducted its own informal review and found no showstoppers. Most of the parts and tools used to build the F119 are still available.
“Eighty-three percent of the parts are actually in production today for sustainment, so we’d have to go out and chase just under 20 percent of the parts,” Bromberg told reporters at a media event near the company’s West Palm Beach engine facility. “Those parts are never easy, but this was not as complicated an exercise as we thought.”
In addition, 75 percent of the tools are in storage at an Air Force facility in California. “We would have to go look at those and see what refurbishment would need to be done,” Bromberg said at the media event, for which Pratt & Whitney paid for press travel. “The remaining tools are common tools, they’re hand tools.”
The Air Force has been studying the cost and feasibility of an F-22 restart at the urging of the House Armed Services Committee. Lockheed Martin [LMT], the F-22’s prime contractor, said it is giving data to the Air Force to support the study.
Lockheed Martin delivered the last F-22 in 2012. While the Air Force had said it required 381 jets, it ended up buying only 187, plus eight test jets, due to cost overruns and a lack of competitors in air-to-air warfare. But since then, China and Russia have become more assertive militarily and have invested more heavily in modern weapon systems. And the Air Force has found the F-22 useful against less-advanced adversaries, such as the Islamic State.
In September 2015, Gen. Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle, then-head of the Air Force’s Air Combat Command, asserted that the Air Force did not buy enough F-22s (Defense Daily, Sept. 15, 2015). “If you look at the way we’re using them today in the current fight we are in, when you look at how we will use them in the future fight, we flat don’t have enough F-22s,” he said.