Air Power: JSF support in Australia | ADM Feb 2011
Julian Kerr | Sydney
Although the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) is expected to take delivery in 2014 of the first two of an eventual fleet of up to 100 F-35A conventional takeoff and landing (CTOL) Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters (JSFs), domestic industry seems unlikely to have more than a peripheral involvement in the support and maintenance of the new type until late 2017.
It is only then that four of the first tranche of 14 JSFs ordered by Australia in 2009 will arrive at RAAF Williamtown for Australian-specific Operational Test and Evaluation (OT&E), and the necessary in-country support and training will swing into action, ramping up as the fleet grows.
On current plans, 10 of the initial 14 Australian aircraft will be delivered to the JSF Integrated Training Centre (ITC) at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, with the first two aircraft delivered in 2014 and the next eight progressively through to 2017 for training the first cadres of Australian pilots, instructors and maintainers. The final four aircraft will fly direct to Australia in late 2017 for OT&E activities and will subsequently be joined by the balance of the tranche to enable the RAAF to stand up its first F-35A squadron at Williamtown in 2018.
Prior to that the RAAF will contribute aircraft, instructors and maintainers to the ITC on a pro-rata basis along with the US and the other seven partner nations in the JSF program. Two Australian maintainers are already at Edwards Air Force Base supporting F-35A development flight testing.
Planning for JSF support has been underway for several years within the New Air Combat Capability (NACC) Project Office in the Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO) and, according to Program Manager Air Vice Marshal Kym Osley, this will continue to be treated as an absolutely core activity.
AVM Osley, previously Head of Defence Staff in Washington, had been in his new position for less than a week when interviewed by ADM in December. Nevertheless, his responsibilities in Washington and, prior to that, roles as Director-General Capability and Plans within Capability Development Group and Commander Air Combat Group, have ensured his familiarity across all major aspects of the JSF program.
Central to JSF sustainment is the common Autonomic Logistics Global Sustainment (ALGS) solution being developed by Lockheed Martin as the global integrator of JSF support. This involves making use wherever possible of existing and planned production and sustainment capabilities in the partner nations.
Lockheed Martin will manage the ALGS under a performance-based contract that will be negotiated with the company by the US government with input from each member of the JSF coalition.
“Bear in mind that the ALGS has been part of the JSF program from the start, it’s not a system that has been tacked on,” AVM Osley said. “We took a long hard look at this right from the start and decided it would be the most cost-effective way to do it.
“The real decision comes down to what point in our supply chain does the ALGS system stop and we then move over to our own systems to provide the parts around Australia and to deployed locations. That’s the key one there.
“We’ll obviously have our own sovereign requirements; we’ll submit those requirements to be considered in the development of the Australian node of ALGS,” AVM Osley said.
Individual JSF program partners will be responsible for covering the extra cost of unique requirements or sharing the expense of common requirements that create additional costs.
“With the ALGS, Lockheed Martin expects that such an arrangement will deliver a 15 to 20 per cent saving compared to traditional sustainment approaches; quite stove-piped ones where the customer owns all its parts which it has sourced, ordered and paid for through a specific pipeline. We’re certainly hoping to realise a reduction in costs in this area,” AVM Osley commented.
Included within the ALGS framework is the so-called Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS), a global network managed by Lockheed Martin that will control the logistics support for all operators of the F-35, whether they be the CTOL F-35A, short takeoff/vertical landing (STOVL) F-35B, or the F-35C carrier variant.
Activities or functions integrated by ALIS include the air vehicle, training, the support system and the best value business approach to supporting the aircraft.
“ALIS will provide the RAAF an information velocity about its fighters that is completely revolutionary in terms of readiness,” Kimberley Gavaletz, Lockheed Martin’s vice president F-35 Sustainment, said.
“This speed and asset visibility will support responses to operational surges unheard of in a global fleet of aircraft. Instead of parts stacking on shelves and becoming obsolete due to upgrades and/or modifications, centralisation of the supply chain will integrate all parts requirements and ensure transportation and distribution to the customer’s requirements.”
The ALIS began operations in 2007 at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics’ headquarters at Fort Worth, capturing real time flight test data. Now it has been expanded to also support test aircraft at Edwards AFB, Eglin AFB and the US Navy’s Patuxent River flight test centre.
The Australian node of the ALIS, together with simulators and training materials, will need to be in place by late 2016 to support the start of in-country OT&E late the following year.
Responsibility rests with the NACC project office for ensuring the ALGS is integrated with Defence’s logistics system, which will handle the delivery within Australia of JSF logistics or sustainment.
“For operations outside Australia we’ll either use the ALGS portal in Australia or else we’ll tap into a JSF portal somewhere in the region near where we’re doing operations and then the Defence logistics operation will ensure the relevant sustainment,” AVM Osley explained to ADM.
For the Australian defence industry, matters are not so clearcut. Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems Australia signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in June 2010 for the planning of future in-country support for the F-35. In practical terms, this means BAE Systems Australia will act as the preferred platform sustainment provider in Australia on Lockheed Martin’s behalf. However, the parameters of this cooperation have yet to be officially decided and agreed.
“The Commonwealth is yet to, in a public way, describe its own support strategy for the aircraft,” John Monaghan, Director Aerospace for BAE Systems Australia, told ADM. “Although we can guess what that should be, there could be all kinds of solutions to be put in place; we don’t even have a clear statement as to what they would like to retain within their service support arrangements and how much they would like to go to industry.
“What the MOU puts in place is an agreement between Lockheed and us for whole aircraft maintenance, repair, overhaul and upgrade services that might be put to industry depending on the Commonwealth’s decisions. Rather than duplicate the existing Australian infrastructure and capability, Lockheed would be pleased to work with us subject to our being able to provide cost-effective support. That’s really the extent of the agreement.”
AVM Osley told ADM that Requests for Proposals for the majority of JSF sustainment elements would be released to Australian industry around 2014-2015.
“The areas of in-country sustainment that we think will be conducted by Australian industry under contract to Lockheed Martin would include airframe deeper maintenance, also aircraft system limited component deeper maintenance, also some of the deeper maintenance for the engines. It would also take in support equipment deeper maintenance, certainly training for air and ground crew, warehousing, and the supply chain management that is unique to Australian requirements.”
Australian industry was unlikely to be directly involved in the support of the initial 14 aircraft prior to their arrival in Australia, he confirmed. Clearly, however, the efficiency of the domestic support infrastructure and procedures will have been fully bedded down prior to the arrival of the main body of 58 aircraft between 2018 and 2022, followed by the final batch of up to 28 aircraft scheduled for delivery in the early 2020s.
Defence’s decision on timing for the final operational squadron – bringing the total number of Australian JSFs to approximately 100 – will depend on the decision on the timing of the withdrawal of the Super Hornets. ADM has previously reported that the Super Hornets are scheduled to operate until at least 2023.
In a subsequent discussion on the JSF program restructuring directed by US Defence Secretary Robert Gates in November (see box), AVM Osley said the changes were unlikely to affect Australia’s current JSF schedule.
“The changes mainly concern the F-35B variant for the US Marines which has experienced technical difficulties and will be delayed for two years,” he explained.
Monaghan said Defence’s timescale gave BAE Systems plenty of time to become familiar with any specific challenges that might be posed by the new type. These would include surface coating support, which would require the establishment of a whole new skillset.
Referring to the same issue, AVM Osley said the low observable (LO) coating on the F-35 was a generation ahead of the F-22 Raptor, which in turn was a generation ahead of the F-117.
“We’ve been focusing very heavily on the maintenance of that LO and we’re very impressed about what’s been done to make it portable and maintainable here in Australia,” he commented.
“Whilst we’re still looking at a number of issues about how we maintain that over time, what sort of refinishing capability we might require in Australia and the rest of it, at this point in time no decisions have been made, but also we’ve seen no show-stoppers in that area.”
Similarly, concerns about problems arising from a centralised supply chain are being discounted.
“There have been teething issues with some systems but there are many weapons systems out there, not just aircraft but missiles and other systems, where performance-based centralised logistics, centralised logistics, have been in place for many years and are working successfully,” AVM Osley said.
Reprogramming electronic warfare (EW) mission data systems is another potentially contentious issue, one on which AVM Osley is confident of a satisfactory solution – although whether extra cost will be involved is not yet clear.
“Because of the area we operate in and our access to high level intelligence there will not be just one solution for all partner nations but there will be a solution where Australia will be able to provide the highest available quality of EW data for programming into our aircraft,” he said.
Given the sophistication of the JSF and its associated systems, International Traffic in Arms (ITARs) regulations could be expected to be a major issue in support planning, but AVM Osley is confident this will not be the case.
“Various options are being examined to minimise the potential for ITAR problems. One of the options being looked at is the ownership of parts until they’re installed in the aircraft resting with the US government, and that means there would be no third-party transfers which means that the ITAR issue would be minimised.”
Monaghan too does not expect ITAR requirements to unduly bother industry.
“They’re completely manageable. It’s really a matter of making sure that the appropriate arrangements are in place prior to the need to accept data and the like for supporting the aircraft.”
Monaghan believes the Commonwealth still has some distance to travel in perceiving the extent to which new information systems in support of the JSF, and the autonomic logistics concepts, will interface with existing systems such as MILIS and systems for supporting deployed forces in a combat zone.
From an overall industry perspective, companies needed to win an early contractual position with the Commonwealth to enable them to participate in the planning process, he said.
For BAE Systems, two to three years before the arrival of the first JSFs in-country would be ample for such a third party contractor to ready the appropriate support infrastructure and resources. In this instance, the company is fortunate is in being able to call on the resources it currently has in place supporting the F/A-18A/B Hornets at RAAF Bases Williamtown and Tindal.
But as Monaghan points out, working on the Hornets as they near the end of their service life clearly generates more work, including structural refurbishment, inspection and repair, than a brand new aircraft.
“Subject to what the Commonwealth chooses to do itself, the kind of resources we have available to us to support the classic Hornets will be more than ample to provide a startup capability for the new fleet when work comes in,” he stated.
Ironically, it’s anticipated that the complexity of the JSF will be accompanied by greater reliability.
“This comes through in the way we’re looking at the sustainment concept,” AVM Osley said. “We’ll certainly have service personnel out there performing operational maintenance at the main operating bases, but if there’s a problem that’s more complex, then I think in most cases the equipment will be going into the sustainment pipeline for deeper maintenance or back to the manufacturer.”
As Lockheed Martin’s Gavaletz points out, the JSF is the first fighter aircraft to use prognostics and health management to monitor and report its health status to maintainers. Critical advantages to this include reduced logistics lag time, reduced spares and support equipment, and reduced maintenance man-hours per flight hour.
AVM Osley says JSF operating costs are still relatively immature at this point.
“While the JSF is much more complex and technologically advanced than the aircraft it replaces, it has more built-in reliability and so I think that overall, the support cost and maintenance effort will be very similar to that of the range of aircraft that the JSF replaces.”