Nothing I wanted to read about but I'll post what popped up....
The photo is a press release by NAVAIR and the following statement is from the JSF Program Office...
But alas, he's crawled under a rock and is no where to be found.
Pathetic.
 |
| The first carrier variant test aircraft for the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter takes off on its 100th test flight Nov. 29 with Marine Corps test pilot Lt. Col. Matthew Taylor at the controls. (Photo courtesy of Lockheed Martin) |
The photo is a press release by NAVAIR and the following statement is from the JSF Program Office...
JPO STATEMENT ON DOD AND LOCKHEED MARTIN REACHING A TENTATIVE F-35 UCA AGREEMENTWhat I wanted to hear was a clarifying statement from the good Admiral. I think everyone following the F-35 wants to hear what he has to say.
The Department of Defense and the Lockheed Martin Corporation have reached a tentative agreement on key terms of the 5th F-35 Low Rate Initial Production contract, known as LRIP 5, which will enable award of an Undefinitized Contract Action (UCA). The key terms include agreement on a fixed-price type contract vehicle and a concurrency clause where DOD and Lockheed Martin will share responsibility on costs for concurrency changes -- modification costs associated with changes discovered during development. The UCA award will allow Lockheed Martin and its suppliers to begin production of the LRIP 5 aircraft and bill for incurred costs. The exact value of the contract and number of aircraft procured will be announced through the normal DOD contract announcement process.
But alas, he's crawled under a rock and is no where to be found.
Pathetic.
the news could have been worse, at least the program is kept alive.
ReplyDeleteah Joe, you're not getting my point here. i'm not looking for optimism, i'm just looking for some facts.
ReplyDeleteif this bird is screwed up then we need to know now. i've fired too many rounds across too many bows based on the belief that people in positions of responsibility wouldn't be telling me bald faced lies and SPINNING me.
now the good Admiral came out and basically said that this program is FUBAR and then he goes and hides.
i don't want to hear good news stories from NAVAIR playing nice. i don't want a blurb from the program office about a backward looking fact.
just tell me the fucking truth and then we can go forward. uh thats them to tell me the truth...
well i have a feeling they cant tell the truth because of backroom politics, with DOD facing a huge budget crunch they are trying to find ways to keep the 35 alive and fixing it for longer life even though IOC has been pushed back. Alot of this smells of politics, they are wanting LM to absorb more costs, so one easy way to do this is to frigthen investors into thinking it might be cancelled, hence their stock climbed today on the news of the LRIP V contract, should the 35 get cancelled they will be in a rush to design another fighter for the AF (the navy can pull off the super hornets for a decade or two and the MC will have to stick to the harriers as long as possible). this new fighter would be on a rushed schedule and might be given to boeing or northrop if they can produce designs fast enough, and LM would be out billions and wasted effort, just seems like politics to me.
ReplyDeleteMy guess is his comment was to get LM to cry "Uncle". Talks seemed to be stalled on who was going to carry certain costs. Now all of a sudden we have progress.
ReplyDeleteAs an outsider looking in, I can't see much more than US politics going on with such a statement.
ReplyDeleteWe've known for a LONG time about the scale of repairs/modifications that are going to be required for the initial SDD jets and the bill for these repairs/modifications as stated by the good Admiral of several million per airframe falls a LONG way short of the $10m per airframe many had "estimated".
Personally I think this is a shot across the bows of the US Congress mandated testing/production "concurrency" idea and the idea that JSF unlike most every other aircraft has to be fully capable of all air to air, air to ground, recon and other missions at IOC.
I think it's a long overdue, publicly stated reality check for those Politicians who seem to think that a cutting edge modern fighter can be brought to full operational standard on good wishes alone and not many years of hardwork, supported by adequate funding and resources.
Look at Typhoon, Rafale, Gripen, Mirage 2000, F-16, F/A-18, F-15, F-22 and so on. Tell me which of those aircraft were fully mission capable in all roles at IOC?
For some reason it is imperative that JSF must be though...
Aussie. luv ya guy but the Marines weren't going to have full mission capability at IOC. it was understood and accepted.
ReplyDeletethis appears to be something a bit more again, but no one seems to understand that what we have here is a self imposed death spiral.
thats what has me wigging out. the program manager is imposing a death spiral on his own program.
Perhaps mate and I hope not, but it seems to me he is just being realistic about how effective the concurrency idea really is and is in fact attempting to salvage something from the program.
ReplyDeleteUSMC were going to have full Block 3 capability at IOC in the early days, it's only been in recent years they've pared back to Block 2 and even that has more multirole capability than just about any of those jets I mentioned earlier, with the possible exception of the Hornet.
I've said for years that concurrency and fast production ramp up isn't the ONLY way to get an affordable JSF program, but it may be the only way to do so by 2017 with 3 separate variants, if those requirements were eased back, by a program manager calling for just that...
If things get bad enough I can see one of the variants being cut and I expect that will mean the -C version. Marines are likely to keep the -B under almost under circumstances and the -A model being cheapest, easiest to test and build and likely to bring the greatest profit margin will continue to be the main variant of the program.
USN may just have to learn to live with the Super Hornet for the forseeable future.
The USMC had always planned to go IOC at Blk2B. Here is a graph from 2001 (the year the production contract was signed) showing the USMC IOC as 2010 (near the end of Blk2C IOT&E) which was a year ahead of the USAF.
ReplyDeleteLink here
Got this from Eric Palmer's site: http://blogs.star-telegram.com/sky_talk/2011/12/two-things-have-come-into-focus-about-the-f-35-joint-strike-fighter-program-in-the-wake-of-both-vice-adm-david-venlets-inter.html
ReplyDeleteI'm almost glad I can't get at the Bloomberg story it refers to. Sounds nightmarish. A redesign of the tailhook and over 700 design change requests in a month and the powerpack/APU system is still not reliable? Not good.
Eric Palmer is "ELP". Like a less intelligent BS or Carlo Kopp when it comes to objectivity and the F-35. And 700 design changes on a program of that scope isn't really anything to write home about. "Design changes" include things as trivial as fixing typos in documents, updating notes on drawings, etc. (Of course those with an agenda will never tell you that.)
ReplyDelete