F-35 finally set to take off

F-35s make their way through the moving assembly line at the F-35 production facility at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics in Fort Worth, Texas.
/ Courtesy of Lockheed Martin

Stealth jet sees enhanced affordability, technical progress

By Kang Seung-woo and Joint Press Corps

Gary North, vice president for customer requirements for aeronautics at Lockheed Martin

FORT WORTH, Texas — A matte-gray Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II streaked down a runway at its plant in Fort Worth and cut into a clear sky over the Lone Star State.

Then, the 15.7-meter-long supersonic jet whose wingspan is 10.7 meters turned into a speck and quickly disappeared out of sight.

Although it was just a test-flight, with an F-16 chasing, the F-35 — dubbed the future of U.S. military aviation — seemed to fly off a high note as the "fifth-generation" stealth fighter has continued to show improvement from its "blemished" past.

This time last year, when Korea's fighter requirement program, better known as the "F-X III competition," was in a full swing, the multirole combat aircraft was a lightning rod for controversy due to technical glitches that caused cost overruns and eventually put the project seven years behind schedule.

However, as Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall said, the F-35 is no longer one of his problem programs."

The Korean Air Force plans to replace its old fleet of F-4s and F-5s with high-tech combat aircraft in the F-X III and the Joint Chiefs of Staff announced in November that it would purchase 40 stealth jets — a de facto endorsement to order 40 F-35s. Korea voted down Boeing's F-15 Silent Eagle in September due to its lack of stealth function.

For Lockheed Martin, there would be no better news than its product's enhanced affordability on its way to securing the Korean deal.

"The cost of an F-35A (for the Air Force) in 2019 will be somewhere between $80 million and $85 million (86 and 91 billion won), with an engine, with profit, with inflation," U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, the Pentagon's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program executive officer, said earlier this month. Lockheed said $85 million is equivalent of $75 million today. The F-35 is a one-size-fits-all plane designed to serve the Navy and Marine Corps as well as the Air Force.

The price tag is nearly half the nation's arms procurement agency's estimation of $152 million.

Lockheed, which has refused to specify the unit price for the F-35, agrees with the assessment.

"I would listen to what the PEO says," Gary North, vice president of customer requirements for aeronautics, told the Korean press contingent in Fort Worth on March 12.

Randy Howard, director of the Korea F-35 campaign, added, "The cost of the F-35 is on a downward path that will lead to a unit recurring flyaway (URF) cost for an F-35A of between $80 million and $85 million. This projected price includes the aircraft, avionics and mission systems, and the engine."

The main cause of the cost overrun was a plan to manufacture F-35s while simultaneously testing them, called concurrency, because the late discovery of bugs and other technical problems requires repairs and redesign work of the aircraft. Kendall denounced it as "acquisition malpractice" a few years ago.

F-35 Lightning II

However, the Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed has steadily shown improvement in low-rate initial production (LRIP). The 11-stage LRIP is for the Department of Defense to compensate for the constant cost overruns and it reduces the number of airframes to be included in LRIP 5 and beyond.

In September, the Pentagon awarded Lockheed F-35 orders under LRIP 6 and 7 for 71 more F-35 fighter jets — 36 under LRIP 6 and 35 under LRIP 7 — which top program officials have marked as a major milestone due to cost reductions.

The average aircraft unit cost for an LRIP 6 one is approximately 2.5 percent lower than that of LRIP 5, and an LRIP 7 fighter has an average unit cost about 6 percent lower than the LRIP 5.

According to Lockheed Martin's F-35 master schedule, the last LRIP series, at 11, is slated to fall on 2017-18, and then beyond, the company will begin full-rate production, which the U.S. aerospace giant expects will drive costs down.

"I will tell you for the last LRIP 5, LRIP 6 and LRIP 7, our company has come in below the cost and we are committed to bringing the cost down as with the words of PEO Bodgan," North said.

Currently, Lockheed is producing 3.5 F-35s per month, but it expects to see the yearly production of the aircraft reach 179 when it, along with Italy and Japan, gets to full-rate production. Last week, its 100th F-35 was delivered to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona.

"The more planes that you have under production in a certain year, the cost per airplane goes down. As the number of the airplane goes up over the years, the cost is coming down. Once it reaches full-rate production, the cost will flatten out as a function of the economics. Our company has been building the airplane for 100 years, so we know what it costs to build an airplane."

However, the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) warned the projection may be too rosy.

"It seems like the most optimistic price estimation made under the premise that international sales of 3,200 F-35s will go ahead as planned," a senior DAPA official said. "There is a gap between the estimated cost and the real contract price as the F-35 is sold through the foreign military sales program for all purchasers."

Along with the price tag, its software is another challenging aspect of the F-35's development because complex systems are held together by millions of lines of code. The F-35 has 8.6 million lines of codes, compared with F-22 Raptor's 2.4 million.

The Korean Air Force wants to purchase F-35s with Block 3F that will give the aircraft its full operational capabilities from 2018, but F-35s are flying today on Block 2B and they plan to complete the flight test by next year and current in-flight testing is 88-percent complete.

Critics say that the F-35 will need Block 3F software by the early 2020s, but the vice president said the 3F will be delivered in 2017.

"We are confident that although you have heard that there may be some delays in the 3F from the Joint Program Office, our company is confident that we will deliver the 3F software to the customers ... and services to meet there operational requirements," said North, a former four-star Air Force general.

North wants people to focus on the F-35's current status, not that of five or 10 years ago.

"Now, we are restructuring and moving on," he said.

"We have designed an airplane to meet the government specifications, but we are testing beyond that because we have been asked and when we find it, then we are going to fix it. We are very aggressive with fixing things because we want to provide the very best airplane out there to young men and women who are going to fly."