...As Do Concerns About New Fighter
With the maiden flight of the first F-35 Joint Strike Fighter
prototype still months away, skeptics are loudly questioning
whether Lockheed Martin can deliver the fighter without significant
technical issues, ever-longer delays, and cost overruns higher than
what the project is already over budget.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports Pentagon officials now
project a $276.5 billion total cost for developing the fighter, and
for purchasing 2,500 of the aircraft for the US and British armed
forces. That's $20 billion more than an estimate done in January
2004... and $75 billion more than was originally forecast when the
program was launched in October 2001.
And that may not be the worst of it, critics say, as the F-35
program is still young... and a lot of work remains to be done to
perfect the aircraft's high-tech systems. Congress has already
allocated funding to begin work of the first seven "production"
aircraft, although flight tests on such a production-spec aircraft
won't occur until 2008 at the earliest.
"Our message is they still have a lot of risks in these things
until they fly the airplane," Michael Sullivan, an acquisition
analyst for the Government Accounting Office, said. "There are
technologies they're counting on that have not been tested
yet."
The GAO recently urged Congress to rein in spending on the F-35
until Lockheed and its contractors show they can build the fighter
they promised -- essentially, put up or shut up.
Officials involved with the program acknowledge the hardest
times are yet to come in the development of the F-35... and those
hurdles have little to do with the actual first flight of the
plane.
"I've told everyone
we'll work to August [flight date], but we'll fly when we're
ready," said Rear Admiral Steven Enewold, the top military official
overseeing the program. "We don't want to rush to make a first
flight and then have something bad happen."
"I'm fairly comfortable through first flight and through the end
of this year," Enewold added. "After that, the risks [of
encountering major technical obstacles] get bigger."
As Aero-News reported in
February, that first flight (tentatively slated for
late August at this time) will involve a conventional
take-off-and-landing version of the F-35 -- the most "normal"
variant of the fighter. A VTOL version of the F-35 -- one that can
take off and land vertically -- is also in the works, to replace
the aging AV-8 Harrier.
Enewold told the
Star-Telegram indications are that Lockheed and its contractors --
BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman -- can successfully produce the
components needed for the test planes and early production fighters
-- and ""we're not going to have to do a bunch of scrap and
rework."
Even if that proves to be the case, however, there's one added
cost Lockheed, its contractors, and the military can't do anything
about: the rising costs of metals and other materials needed for
the jet. "We're seeing 200 percent increases in aluminum, 500
percent in titanium," Enewold said. "That's a big issue."
But the GAO maintains the real potential of huge cost increases
lies in the program's plans to begin building production airplanes
before most of the flight testing is done on all versions of the
F-35.
Should production have to be halted to make design changes -- as
Sullivan says has happened in many other programs -- "is a huge
driver of costs."
"To us, it's measure twice, cut once," Sullivan said.