JSF: "no miracle needed"

No miracles are required for the Joint Strike Fighter to meet Australia's schedule for entry into service, according to Lockheed Martin.
The chances of the F-35A Joint Strike Fighter meeting the RAAF's schedule, budget and capability targets are "good and getting better", according to Tom Burbage, Executive Vice President of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics and leader of its JSF team.

Burbage was bullish in a presentation to Australian journalists at Lockheed Martin's Fort Worth plant in Texas in early-December last year. But he acknowledged the uncertainty created by the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defence Review and the annual horse-trading between the Pentagon, Congress and the White House over US defence budgets when he added that Lockheed Martin, as prime contractor for the Joint Strike Fighter, has no control over political processes currently under way which could affect the JSF program.

Nevertheless, he told the Australian media contingent that no miracles are needed for the F-35 to meet Australia's schedule, budget and capability requirements and that he personally was very optimistic.

Presently the Unit Recurrent Flyaway Cost of a Conventional Take-Off and Landing (CTOL) F-35A is about US$45 million in FY2002 dollars, but Lockheed is aiming to bring this down, Burbage said. On current plans Australia's first F-35A will be handed over in May 2012 with others following later that year. These aircraft will be manufactured as part of the fourth batch of Low-Rate Initial Production (LRIP) F-35s and Australia will be one of the first of the eight international partners to receive its aircraft.

Australia's initial aircraft will be delivered with Block 2 avionics - sufficient to enable initial conversion training to begin in the USA pending completion of Operational Test & Evaluation (OT&E) of Block 3 avionics and software in 2013. The full Block 3 capability, which delivers the full functionality of the weapons, sensor data fusion system and distributed aperture Electro-Optical Targeting System will be available from the completion of OT&E.

On current plans the RAAF's first F-35A squadron will be fully operational back in Australia in 2014.

Notwithstanding Burbage's caution about US political processes, his comments were made after US defence and aerospace industry leaders had received a confidential briefing from US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the implications to them of the QDR. The QDR is expected to be released this month, along with the final version of the US defence budget for Fiscal Year (FY) 2006.

Burbage's upbeat comments seem to suggest that fears of wholesale cuts to the program - including the axeing of the CTOL F-35A variant - are groundless, or at least over-blown. The worst-case scenario for Australia, and for many other international partners, would have been cancellation of the F-35A with the US Air Force and many international partners directed to adopt the heavier F-35C naval variant which is strengthened for carrier take-offs and landings.

This would have introduced delays to the program and increased the cost to the customer by over 20 per cent, from an estimated F-35A Unit Recurrent Flyaway Cost of about US$45 million each to about US$55 million each for the naval F-35C variant and the Short Take-Off Vertical Landing (STOVL) F-35B.

Unless there has been a significant and well-hidden change of heart in Washington, the QDR shouldn't contain too much bad news for Australia, so far as the F-35A is concerned. But the devil is in the detail and despite Burbage's optimism it's hard to imagine the budget and QDR won't have at least some negative consequences for Australia.

However, the DMO maintains that the JSF is still 'very much at the lower end' of the price range of the original contenders for Project Air 6000. Estimates of the unit cost of a Eurofighter Typhoon, for example, vary from US$65 million to US$75 million, though precise comparisons are notoriously hard to estimate.

There is a near-linear relationship between the weight of a combat aircraft and its cost; the weight reductions achieved on the F-35B have helped reduce the weight, and therefore the cost, of the F-35A, Burbage says, hence his expectation that the cost could fall still further.

Regardless of the QDR and US budget outcomes, the current SDD, LRIP and Full Rate Production (FRP) schedule is an elaborate structure with many dependencies - US Congressional and Senate approval for budget requests are just two of them.

Three different, though closely related, aircraft will be built and tested for four different customers; all of them will use the same avionics suite, which will be delivered and tested in three successive blocks; the avionics will be test-flown initially on a dedicated test and trials platform before Developmental T&E can begin aboard any of the F-35 variants.

So far only the SDD phase is funded. This will see the production of 22 airframes, of which only 14 will actually fly - the remainder will be used for structural, mechanical and Low-Observables (LO, or stealth) testing. First flight of the F-35A CTOL aircraft is scheduled for August this year, followed by a second F-35A in early-2008. The first F-35B STOVL aircraft will fly in late-2007 and the first naval, or CV, F-35C will fly in early-2009.

The aircraft themselves will be built initially under Lockheed Martin's SDD contract which it expects will transition seamlessly into the first LRIP contract so that production ramps up smoothly from one aircraft a month in 2009 to six a month in late-2011 (LRIP batch 3) and then building gradually to 15 aircraft a month in Full-Rate Production (FRP) by the end of 2015.

According to the DMO long-lead contracts will be awarded this calendar year for items required to produce the first five LRIP aircraft for the USAF. Full funding for this first LRIP batch - and hence the opening of Australian industry's window of opportunity for the LRIP program - is scheduled for 2007.

August this year will also see the first flight of the Cooperative Avionics Test Bed (CATB - more commonly referred to as the CAT Bird), a heavily modified Boeing 737 airliner which will carry a full suite of F-35 sensors in the nose of the aircraft and on fins and strakes located around the forward fuselage to replicate exactly the spatial relationships between the various elements making up the Distributed Aperture System (DAS) for the F-35's Electronic Warfare and Electro-Optical Targeting Systems.

Getting that spatial relationship exactly right is essential - it's the correlation and fusion of data from the F-35's suite of active and passive sensors which builds up the 360 degree '
The CAT Bird will have a fully functional JSF cockpit in the forward part of the cabin with workspaces for 30 software and systems engineers further aft to enable in-flight testing of the sensors, individually and then in concert. The flight test program will build up incrementally: first flights will be conducted with just the EW sensors operating, with the other sensors being fired up and integrated gradually.

The F-35's APQ-81 active phased array radar began flight testing aboard manufacturer Northrop Grumman's BAC-111 airborne test bed at Baltimore in August last year. Similarly, initial flight testing of the Electro-Optical sensor system's DAS has already commenced at Edwards Air Force Base aboard a modified F-16.

There's no doubt the avionics integration and flight testing program represents one of the highest-risk elements of the whole JSF program and this element of the project has the potential to inflict significant delays on the JSF schedule.

The same applies, though in a lesser degree, to the JSF platform and propulsion system. While the aerodynamic performance and handling of the aircraft can be predicted fairly accurately, along with the platform's LO characteristics, aviation history shows there are always surprises lying in wait. These can only be resolved by patient developmental flight testing.

The flight test program will also validate the JSF's propulsion system. Two consortia are developing separate engines for the F-35. Leading the engine program is Pratt & Whitney, whose F-135 engine had undergone some 4,000 hours of testing by the end of November 2005. Some 1,900 hours were devoted to the conventional flight regimes of the F-35A and -C variants, while 2,100 hours have been devoted to the much higher-risk STOVL flight regime of the F-35B. Rolls-Royce provides those elements of the F-135 which enable vertical and intermediate flight in the transition to and from the hover - the LiftFan, 3 Bearing Swivel Module (3BSM) for the jet
In parallel, thought slightly in trail, General Electric and Rolls-Royce Fighter Engine Team (FET) are developing the F-136 variant which is designed to be a fully interchangeable form, fit and function replacement for the F-135 in all three variants of the JSF. This too is now under test and as of December last year had racked up 160 and 50 hours, respectively, in the CTOL and STOVL modes.

Block 1 avionics DT&E begins in late-2008, ending in late-2010; DT&E of Block 2 avionics begins at the end of 2009 and segues into Operational T&E in late-2011; Block 3 DT&E begins in late-2010 - OT&E begins late-2012 and all testing should be complete by late-2013.

Somewhat confusingly, Initial Operational Capability (IOC) for the US Marine Corps (F-35B), USAF and USN (F-35A and F-35C, respectively) precedes some of these milestones. The US definition of IOC is when the first full squadron is fully combat ready; the USMC expects to reach that milestone with an interim combat capability in mid-2012 at the completion of Block 2 OT&E. The USAF and USN will declare IOC in early/mid-2013 while Block 3 OT&E is still under way. The UK Royal Air Force and Royal Navy expect to declare IOC in late-2014, at about the same time as the RAAF.

These dates represent a slippage of over a year, due mainly to the F-35B weight loss program, which delayed the first flights of all three variants by a year or so as well.

None of the other international partners have signed an order for the F-35 as yet so numbers and schedules remain a moot point. These will be addressed in the multi-lateral Production, Sustainment and Follow-on Development (PSD) MoU which all nine JSF partners will sign in December this year. The terms, conditions and language of the MoU were thrashed out in a series of three meetings during 2005, the last of them in December, and the final draft should be substantially complete by about June, according to Burbage.

Once the partner nations have considered the MoU under their own internal processes, they are all expected to sign in December. The MoU endures for the 'Life of the Program', Burbage says - a 40-year commitment - and addresses the management structure, procurement process, contractual arrangements and financial commitments required of each partner. It also recognises the various partners' differing national processes for procurement and funding of major defence acquisitions.

JSF Air System sustainment, including prospective regional support capabilities, are not part of the PSFD MoU negotiation process as such, the DMO says. But Defence and the Federal Cabinet will require confidence that suitable support arrangements are either in place or that there is an acceptable process for developing these arrangements before Australia commits to the PSFD MoU.

Locally, BAE Systems heads an industry team seeking to secure the regional support base for the JSF in Australia. As Australia is (so far) the sole JSF customer in the Asia-Pacific region there would appear to be no reason why Australia shouldn't have its own national maintenance hub, but Burbage cautioned that Australia, like all of the partners, will need to determine its sovereign national support capability requirements and so the level of support it needs to be able to undertake locally.

"Should a Regional Support approach prove to be the most feasible ... for providing JSF Air System support in the Australian region, then Australia is confident that the US would support such an approach," the DMO told ADM.

The PSFD MoU is a critical milestone for all partners, and for Lockheed Martin - unless they sign it, partners cease to be part of the cooperative procurement program. And when they do sign it, the partners must provide a firm estimate of the number of aircraft they need and their preferred delivery schedule. They will also be required to pay what Lockheed Martin terms a 'fair share' of the non-recurring costs associated with moving to full production.

It's uncertain what Australia's share will be at this stage: although the large majority of NREs are incurred in the SDD phase, says the DMO, commitment to the PSFD MoU does include an obligation to share some additional costs - primarily production tooling, project office expenses, sustaining engineering and NREs associated with follow-on development. These costs will generally be shared proportionally to the number of aircraft a partner is intending to procure. Australia's total contribution is still being refined as part of the PSFD MoU negotiation process.

With production under way, the LRIP program will run for seven phases and will see aircraft deliveries begin in 2009. The first international partner deliveries will begin in 2010/11 under LRIP Phase 3 with the first Australian delivery currently scheduled for May 2012 under LRIP Phase 4. The first FRP deliveries will be in 2015.

By that stage Lockheed Martin's mile-long F-35 plant at Ft Worth will be building 15 aircraft a month for the Pentagon and existing international partners, with capacity for eight more a month. Unless some of those customers demand a higher delivery rate the unused capacity will enable Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon to seek additional US Foreign Military Sales (FMS) customers for the F-35, such as Israel and Singapore, with first deliveries as early as January 2014.

Australian industry is waiting for the LRIP window of opportunity to open. While work won by Australian companies in the 22-aircraft SDD phase amounts currently to less than $100 million, this is expected to multiply in the 519-aircraft LRIP and Full Rate Production (FRP) phases. Beyond the work already won in SDD Australian industry is pursuing additional opportunities, including second source opportunities, that are expected to flow into LRIP/FRP contracts.

Defence expects that Australian industry will win work during the rest of the SDD phase and during LRIP that's worth considerably more than Australia's initial investment in the SDD phase. Australian industry has already performed well in the SDD phase, but the fact that contracts are awarded in an internationally competitive environment means there are still no guarantees for local firms.

The F-35's LO performance will create new operational and support challenges for most of its operators. Lockheed Martin has refused steadfastly to comment in detail on the aircraft's stealth capabilities, except to say it has all-aspect stealth for both air-air and air-ground operations. The LO performance of the aircraft, which derives from both its shape and various external coatings, was specified by the Pentagon and is reportedly a demanding requirement; the partner nations have been given undertakings on the LO performance of their aircraft without any guarantee that these will match the LO performance of aircraft ordered by the Pentagon.

Lockheed Martin's Ft Worth site includes a Radar Cross Section (RCS) measurement facility designed to measure the RCS of each aircraft which merges from the production line and, in due course, from maintenance. The RCS measurement facility enables the company and the Pentagon to measure the quality and consistency of the manufacturing and maintenance processes, and their effect on the aircraft's LO characteristics, and also affords the opportunity to certify the aircraft's LO performance before delivery to its customer.

One of the challenges for the company, and the Pentagon and the US State Department, has been to develop a stealthy platform which satisfies the capability requirements of all of its customers but doesn't compromise the USA's technology lead in this area. The Australian media tour of the Ft Worth production line suggested that while there will be little or no structural difference between aircraft ordered by the Pentagon and export customers, there is potential for variations in the types of coating.

To use a very crude analogy, it would be like having tins of paint of different degrees of opacity - the most opaque paint would remain in the USA while the 'thinner' paints would be made available to export customers, enabling them to maintain their own aircraft and the integrity of their LO capabilities during routine operations without compromising the USA's pre-eminence in either combat capability or underlying technology. However, this amounts to speculation.

Flight testing will show just how durable those LO capabilities are when confronted with the need to sustain three sorties a day for realistic periods of time, and how much support is required to maintain the aircraft's RCS.

This is a critical issue for in-country support of the F-35, Burbage said: while some of the LO capability is fairly easily maintained at a local level, much of it isn't. This would suggest that for certain maintenance and repair activities the aircraft might need to be returned to the US, or a highly skilled repair team will be required in-country. The nature of LO structural shaping and coatings is such, in any case, that even minor damage could increase the aircraft's RCS quite markedly so access to a suitably calibrated RCS measurement facility may be required simply to ensure the RCS is restored to its correct value after heavy maintenance or repairs.

The JSF will replace no less than seven different aircraft types operated by the eight international partners, making future coalitions more interoperable and mutually supportable. This in turn suggests that too great a difference between the RCSs of the US and 'export' variants, and too much dependence on US support for the LO capability, would work against the concept of coalition warfare in the future.

Differences in LO performance don't just show up as a blip on a radar screen: they emerge in tactics as well. This point has emerged during Operation Agile Endeavour, a program which has seen pilots from all the JSF partner nations fly the F-35 manned tactical simulator at Ft Worth.

The capabilities bestowed by all-aspect stealth, sensor data fusion, new-generation optical and radar sensors and the inherent networking 'connectivity' of the F-35 have made it possible to develop all-new tactics for the aircraft which exploit its capabilities to the maximum.

The Pentagon would like its coalition partners to use aircraft with similar performance and RCS to the USAF, Marines and Navy, along with the same tactics, procedures and mission planning protocols, which suggests that major differences between US and export aircraft will be unacceptable.

The F/A-22 Raptor has demonstrated that stealth enables a step change in air combat capability which results in total air dominance, says Lockheed Martin. How far this will be true also of the F-35 won't become apparent until well into its T&E program; but if the F-35 is as good as its supporters predict, then US control over access to the aircraft and, through it, to the LO technology it embodies will become a key determinant of the air threat environment faced by the US and its allies during the first half of this century. Food for thought.

By Gregor Ferguson, Adelaide & Ft Worth