Note: They have not responded to Dave's excellent reporting on the issues with this airplane. The heat is on. Ms. Martin needs to get her affairs in order. I'm sure she'll be a target in the investigation into one of the biggest frauds in defense procurement history. Have you observed that we're seeing less of LM's President when it comes to making announcements about the plane? Ms. Hewson has outstanding survival instincts!
"They've trained over 1,500 maintainers at Eglin."
ReplyDelete--So I guess there is no need to rob A-10 mechanics. We knew that was a concocted effort to get rid of CAS capability.
"ALIS is now a complete and up-and-running entity."
--Perhaps. Bogdan, Sep 15, 2014: .."We’ve got ALIS that’s behind. . ."
"We got into flight test with 3i software and completed most of the 2B testing. We have very little of the 2B testing yet to go. And 2B will be the baseline that our Marine Corps will go IOC with in July of next year (2015)."
--Block 2B software, designed to manage missiles and bombs, was supposed to have been ready for use at the end of 2012, and more recently was scheduled for completion Oct 2014. Testing has been delayed by the plane fire at Eglin on June 23, not mentioned. DOT&E: F-35s equipped with Block 2B “would likely need significant support from other fourth-generation and fifth-generation combat systems to counter modern, existing threats, unless air superiority is somehow otherwise assured and the threat is cooperative.”
"In fact, from the first production to today aircraft it's a 57% reduction in price."
--from Appendix I, GAO Report Mar 2013
aircraft unit cost - millions
2001 - $69
2005 - $82
2006 - $86
2007 - $104
2008 - $104
2009 - $104
2010 - $112
2011 - $133
2012 - $137
The current F-35A unit procurement cost is $185 million, as I posted with comptroller link in a previous comment. The F-35B cost is much more.
Ms. Martin made no mention of the F-35 engine failure and plane destruction at Eglin on June 23, with no design fix announced yet. There are two principal problems with the largest, heaviest and hottest engine ever put in a fighter plane -- excessive flex and poor containment, which led to the catastrophic failure on June 23. What is the fix? An air worthiness certification before IOC would require safety board sign-off on engine design changes.
Get real.
ReplyDeleteThe production line is running hot, the next blocks are neck-deep in development and everything with our allies has been pre-arranged to make this happen for at least decade.
It.wont.get.canceled.
Opening F-22 line again or buying new Advanced Super Hornets would be awesome but too much has been invested in to this.
I`d rather see DDG-1000 line open up again than F-22.
DeleteAs it turns out, new Burkes with upgrades will cost about as much as Zumwalts would - but the Zumwalts are a lot more better and built in mind with future upgrades - ie lasers,railguns and most likely LRASM capability.
@ Eldererr
DeleteGet real? What's not real about anything I have posted.
Martin spouted a lot of BS, and she must be answered, whether you like it or not.
If the truth bothers you, then you need to "get real."
A general comment to those that deluded themselves in to thinking that F-35 program will be canceled.
DeleteAnd there lots of them, most that will happen is that number of F-35s is going to be cut but it wont get canceled.
you don't quite understand. a cut in numbers which is inevitable but not desirable, will be the worst thing for people that want a strong US defense. an outright cancellation will pressurize work on the 6th gen plane that we should be working on now while allowing for the kind of upgrades to the F-15,16,18 that we should already be doing.
Deletecuts will simply allow the program to do what its already doing. soak up money best spent elsewhere while delivering little. US airpower will be hopelessly crippled and allied forces will be destroyed.
I understand that.
DeleteIm not an American as you can tell by lousy grammar - I`m Latvian, a patriot of a country whos alliance with US and NATO has saved us from Ukraines fate.
I want strong US with superior military assets and economical power.
However I cant stand wishful thinking and delusion. As it is with F-35 and constant ''the end is nigh'' quacking - it wont get canceled. The time for that was back in 2010/2011. Thats it - you are stuck with it.
Question you should be asking is - okay, we got this turd, can we actually make it stink less and look nice? You can, however it`ll cost a lot more.
Should you? Probably, build enough of F-35s (200 of each variants) and redirect the funds to 6th gen fighter.
But I hate to spoil it - its the procurement process that will make sabotage all future projects - be it replacement for Apaches, F-22s , next carriers, next drones and next LRSB.
The fact people are rioting for some dead kid - tragedy yes - but not for billions, fuck it - trillions of your money,your wealth wasted on pointless shit is what baffles me. In any other country White House wouldve been burned to the ground and all Senators castarated with an olive fork.
your english is outstanding. your grammar excellent. i don't buy the thinking that because we've spent x-number of dollars that suddenly we are too far along to cancel a project. my simplistic cost benefit analysis tells me that it will be detrimental to our defenses to continue tossing money down this black hole. additionally the damage done to the defense industry might be saved because we will open upgrades and a new plane to many corporations that might have gone under if we stayed the course.
Deletewhen a leader receives new information...no matter how determined his is to carry on his attack...if that new information tells him that he's headed to disaster he must reconsider.being wrong but saving your command is much preferred to stubborn determination to attempt to gain victory when every scrap of info tells you you're headed towards defeat.
200 of each variant = 600 jets overall. SInce Lockheed Martin is only in this _losing proposition_ (on every LRIP jet they make) so that they can get to the 'back end' of the continued FMS sales and sole-sourced maintenance via their very own trouble-light ALIS system (it costs what we say it does), if you take away 75% of the U.S. build alone, there will be NO payoff in the outyears for maintenance and continued sales.
DeleteAnd LM will walk away. Probably into bankruptcy and division breakup in favor of space and missiles.
Since LM is also GD, that means we are left with Boeing and their legacy collection of crap from the 1970s as Hornet and Eagle design baselines. And Northrop/Grumman who have some naval fighter experience but who haven't built a tactical aircraft since the 1990s.
Let me add here that the USN, which is the author of this massive foulup with their idiotic A-12, F/A-18E/F and TAMP efforts to cut into JSF production, sticking the USAF with the bill for 2,400 F-35As that they never wanted and DO NOT NEED (F-22 reduces IADS, F-16 and UCAS go in to finish the war) _should not_ be rewarded for their national betrayal of loyalty by getting Gen-6 as F/A-XX simply because they have no naval VLO otherwise.
The Navy knew about DF-21D for at least a decade before it became public knowledge. And yet they didn't put an all-stop on the 584nm ranged, all subsonic, JSF (= one strike per day, with landbased refueling, to about 1,000nm, leaving a safety margin on a 1,500km missile of about 100nm).
They have a MASSIVE inferiority complex and a desire to control everything they are a part of to the extent that they actively sabotage (F-111 anyone?) any multiservice effort they are a part of. Bluntly, the are The French of the U.S. Armed Forces.
The should get nothing but a noose for their traitorous actions that have led up to the F-35 and through it, to this disastrous endgame.
The biggest problem with all these 'modernization through incremental updates of existing systems while pursuing another vaporware future tech solution' is that the nature of airpower itself is about to change.
You see this with ICD and the ability to reach out and touch BASING MODES, in minutes, with missiles, what it would take HOURS for conventional airpower to respond to. You see this in the progress made on Solid State Lasers and Hunting Weapons like the Gamma Firestrike and the FIM-160 MALI. You see this in the switch to RF for comms and IR/EO for targeting. You see this in the belated acknowledgement that sacrificial drones with massive endurance advantages are more useful than fast and furious but oh so temporary fighter air as the cost of airpower becomes unsustainable on a CPFH basis.
Technology and resource limits are pushing warfare towards new horizons. And by not responding to those shifts with things like HSP (Hypersonic Strike Platforms) and Tactical Missiles not Jets, we are rapidly becoming The Winged Hussars of a modern world that no longer works based on the model of WWII airpower. That doesn't have to.
Gen-6 as F/A-XX is a perpetuation of a dinosaurian mythos about what STRIKE warfare should be like. Just like JAST was Advanced until they made the F-35 an 'air' solution, we must get past the manned notion of airpower or we will be KT Boundaried by our own specialist, dogmatized, doctrines.
Ironically, I think that cancellation would be good for Lockheed in the long run. They would take a huge hit in the present, no doubt, but they could take the incomplete, bug ridden, engine igniting F35 and have 7 or 8 years to fix the numerous problems in time for it to be the so-called 6th gen. The biggest problem myself and most F35 critics have is that it is that they do not have a weapon that men can depend their lives on, at a price no one can afford, and promises that are presently lies. The thing everyone not on the Lockheed payroll likes is what the plane is SUPPOSSED TO DO not what it ACTUALLY DOES. Every pro-35 cool-aid drinker talks about sensor fusion--which it is supposed to do but doesn't, air superiority--which it is supposed to do but doesn't, etc.
ReplyDeleteSometimes we bite off more than we can chew in technology. Evolution is dependable, while tech "revolutions" are not always so dependible The smartest men and women in the world have been promising nuclear fusion being "20 years away" for 4O years now. (yea, I heard Lockheed says they did it...but release no proof...just like everything else they do nowadays).
SO cancel the F35 now, and in 2025, Lockheed may have a winner on their hands. They don't right now. And if they get away with pushing an unprepared aircraft it wont be Lockheed that pays the price it will be US pilots and they will pay the price in blood not dollars.
If they were to cancel the F-35 tomorrow, the Pentagon would within a year start a new Light Weight Figher competition to build an "F-16 II", that would in the end look like a "cheap" version of the F-35, probably eventually cost as much as the F-35, and probably allow Lockheed Martin to be a lead or sub contractor. That's how ridiculous this is. The F-35 being promised in 2006 at a cost of $60 million a copy, today growing to $120 million is a failure. And Lockheed keeps being rewarded for failure because of the structure of these contracts.
DeleteAs recently as 1990 when then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney canceled the A-12 Avenger II program (carrier based stealth attack jets that looked like mini B-2s) in favor of buying more F/A-18s, this country did that. You know what that did to McDonald Douglas, its principle contractor? Their failure to control costs (estimated to eat up 75% of the Naval Aviation budget in 3 years) KILLED the company. They had no choice but to merge it with Boeing a few years later, because if they didn't they would have been out on the street and their corporate leadership liable for legal sanction by investors. And how much were the losses up to that point? A then substantial but now paltry $2 billion. Yes. Two billion dollars. As opposed to the F-35s hundred billion dollars.
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Delete
DeleteWhat happened next is what got us into this mess. The cancellation of the A-12 was one of the biggest nails in the coffin for Macdonald Douglas. Within a few years, it was bought by Boeing, being one of the first parts of the 1990s Defense Industry consolidation that happened in the US and Europe and drove up costs due to less competition. But it got worse. Macdonald Douglas, then Boeing sued for breach of contract. It's still in court. Only this (last) January they settled the case in court!
LM will fold as a tactical airframe maker if the JSF is cancelled.
DeleteThis will mean that the overlap between Marietta and Fort Worth will go away, stealing, not 50% but 70%+ of our tacair experience base in a nation which has already allowed McDonnell to 'become' Boeing as the latter rides the laurels of the F-15/18 success but, being a big commercial house, doesn't make serious investments in the kinds of technology baselines which define advancement in military aerospace.
And it is these PRIVATE investments which give you the insight as much as edge when the USAF itself comes to you with an RFI that amounts to a knowledge quest because they haven't a clue what tomorrows fighter technology will include either.
The biggest problem is not what airpower does in the target area but what it does TO GET THERE, in a short period of time across a minimal 1,000-1,500nm radius. What this means is supercruise is not a tool to be implemented in the tactical arena (because modern IRST can see the stagnation temp contrast from the bowshock at anything over 1.3) but rather a /transit/ device to get you beyond the point at which a BASM can send a 1 ton MARV in 10 minutes at 10 million per shot, so that you can deliver 8-16 GBU-53 on the equivalent number of point targets instead.
That is the only real advantage tacair has now, it is so expensive to operate in terms of acquisition and operating costs that it's only through the leveraged ability to hit a bunch of targets too small and too cheap to waste a long range missile on (Fedayin technical with ZPU-2 in the back) that it justifies itself.
The problem being that that 10 million dollar DF-21D is worth a 1,000 shots to kill a 30 billion dollar CSF. And if they launch those thousand missiles in waves of just 200 at a time, they will beat down any defense based on kinetic intercept from 4 million dollar SM-3IIa/b.
Further to this, it is thermodynamically impossible, right now, to put a 30,000lb thrust engine on less than a 50,000lb stealth airframe in less than pairs and expect supercruise level performance. It will likely ALWAYS be so, so long as we use kerosene based fuels because no matter how much materials improvement you make in them, the energy density, by mass, of their fuel is going to be roughly 46 megajoules per kilogram for JP-8.
Which means you can only get more goose by making the engine bigger to accept higher mass flows and higher mass flows require more fuel for the stoichiometric temp level as TET. And more fuel per pound of thrust per hour (TSFC) = a scaling game you can never win because you run out of thrust before you get enough gas to make use of supercruise as a longrange transit aid.
No supercruise = 1 mission per day. Which suddenly makes the 'all strike, all the time' missile option (HSSW for a choice) more acceptable, even if the missile itself is 2 million each (= 75 million per JSF not bought).
DeleteNow. Did you move up to methane, your energy density goes to about 55 and for hydrogen, about 142 MJ per kilo.
The problem is that this nation doesn't stay rich by supporting a transition to a hydrogen based economy but rather by maintaining the stranglehold of the U.S. Dollar as the base petroleum exchange currency by which our economy is as strong as the ROW wants to by oil with our ridiculously overeased money.
Add to this an increasingly retarded population which is about to transition to majority rule by IQ 95 Hispanics (we graduate 13% of our society as STEM majors, China, grads 50%) and I _seriously doubt_ we even have the technology base to make that fundamental (handling and safety issues abound) change.
CONCLUSION:
The days of fixed wing airpower as a principle means of delivering untouchable expeditionary force are coming to an end. Just like the Roman legions became 'unaffordable' to the pillaging advance of Asian steppe culture horse tribes, we can no longer generate the kinds of airpower that will survive the simple kill-the-base-in destruction of entire air wings trying to land on limited landbased or carrier airpower nodes.
We cannot avoid this and maintain viable sortie rates on subsonic airpower because it takes 10-12 even 15 hours to run a strike mission from sufficient standoff to protect the basing mode. And we cannot make something smaller/cheaper than a Raptor with which to make supercruise strikes in an hour over 1,500nm radii possible without switching to a new fuel which would be very unwise, economically and technically unachievable.
This leads to the outcome: AIRPOWER IS DEAD. And a need to switch to both survivable missiles, sacrificial drones and masses of DEWS weapons to recapitalize our military, on the cheap.
more Martin/response
ReplyDelete"The Australians added another 58 aircraft to their initial buy"
--As the JSF unit cost has increased, JSF partner Australia has steadily decreased its buy quantity from 100 to 58 and now back to 72. This is because Australia originally estimated unit cost at $40m and it's now $185m and climbing. Australia's two ordered planes have been delivered, and it has no more on order.
"We also saw Turkey order its first operational aircraft"
--Turkey has been "ordering aircraft" for years. news headlines--
Feb 24, 2012 -- Turkey plans on buying 100 F-35
Oct 21, 2013 -- Turkey To Reissue F-35 Order
Jan 11, 2013 -- Turkey Postpones Order for Its First Two F-35 Fighters
May 9, 2014 -- Turkey set to order two F-35 joint strike fighters
Jun 5, 2014 -- Turkey is slated to buy 100 F-35As and has placed a firm order for the first two jets.
Nov 21, 2014 -- Lockheed awarded contract for LRIP-8, still none ordered for Turkey
"The UK signed up for four aircraft"
--UK JSF quantity plans, because of the escalating unit cost, have decreased from 138 to 48, fourteen of which were repeatedly promised for over a year, then a supposed announcement when the B's were to visit the UK, canceled because of the Eglin fire and the UK no-show. Now the UK has ordered ...four.
What's with the off-target impact in the video which is labeled as "weapons delivery accuracy?"
ReplyDeleteGood catch Don, looked like 2 misses to me. What's this Blueprint for Affordability from LMT funding? Affordable in 2019? Wasn't it just last month that US Govt was putting hundreds of millions of dollars for the next 3 years to reduce the price? Is that separate or something else?
Delete@Don, it probably is nothing but something some of us have noticed on the carrier catapult launches is what appears that F35 goes in AB once in the air only, I've noticed a few videos, even in this one at 3:37 mark, the pilot seems to go in AB only once the wheels are off the ground, is that normal? This "fighter" seems to only go into AB only once it's in the air.......is the potential damage done to even regular runways that bad?
The Blueprint for Affordability: The Pentagon could invest an extra USD100 million per year in the F-35 program between 2016 and 2018 to make the aircraft more affordable to produce. Lockheed Martin and its major subcontractors previously pledged USD170 million through 2015
Delete1. The amounts are miniscule compared to the cost of the ~$200m planes.
2. Manufacturers, including Lockheed, always have various 'value engineering' programs to reduce manufacturing costs, thereby increasing profits. It's a routine part of manufacturing. It's a standard. So this "blueprint" is something Bogdan and Martin dreamed up to impress the rubes.
The catapult: I think it's normal, for the reason you mention.
In plain English:
ReplyDeleteSurrender is not an option. Never surrender. Never give up. I've got a decal on my pickup: Die Trying. Quitting is for losers. Is that wishful thinking and delusion? Perhaps to some. We're not all the same.
And look-- the Lockheed JSF manager has to appear before a camera in a hoked-up factory scene and lie her head off. So who's guilty of wishful thinking and delusion? She is. She's desperate. She's got a major engine problem, for one thing, as evidenced by the fact that she didn't even mention the Eglin "mishap" and the fleet-wide grounding and the operational restrictions and the impending engine redesign. Didn't want to go there. Everything's amazing, which knocks her socks off. Sure. THAT's wishful thinking and delusion.
Of course!
DeleteThey have always lied without blushing and its naive to think they`ll ever admit their own failures (maybe decade from now when its all over and they`ll put on aviators in #dealwithit mode).
Thats why resistance this to prorgram is never going to be in the offices where the decisions to kill projects are made - they`ll get bribed and by the time F-35 enters and fails first missions, they`ll be gone from the position and once again your Army will be caught with pants down.
However that doesnt mean that what critics do is meaningless.
"I want strong US with superior military assets and economical power" Difficult to do if the F-35 gets shot down vs emerging and some existing threats.
ReplyDeleteA strong country requires strong people, too, like a couple of blog-meisters I can think of.
DeleteI hope Canada never buy this bomber.
ReplyDeleteAs i said in the ELP blog, Super Hornets and Growlers will detect any stealth airplane using the. cooperative passive geo-location of enemy emitters, using the Rockwell Collins-developed Tactical Targeting Network Technology waveform and a technique called Emitter Time Distance of Arrival (TDOA), also using the new IRST to share and fussion all the data. Then the Growler will jam the stealth airplane's radar and launch amraams to its dorection, and the super hornets more amraams and aim-9x. The stealth fighter will have to shoot down it's radar to avoid the amraams and won't be able to pass any data to its launched Amraams or to other stealth fighters acting in passive mode, and will have to run to scape from the Aim-9X.
That's the end of the F-35 sensor fusion story, they will have to stay quiet if there were super hornets and growlers in the area.
http://news.usni.org/2014/04/07/navy-preparing-aggressive-growler-operations
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aNYw32us3Gk
You know how about more Harriers maybe? Planes that can actually provide close air support?
ReplyDeleteWhich is a great point. Take a piece of paper and put down what today's USMC Harrier can do (including LITENING POD, HOBS AIM-9 and AMRAAM, cost per flight hour and so on. "But the Harrier isn't survivable vs. big threats." .... neither is the F-35.
DeleteThe F-35 program with the amount of funds now sunk into it simply is "too big to fail" whatever way you cut it. With the way lobbying works in the US you can rest assures no terminal "death spiral" will be allowed to take place. One way or another the F-35 is coming.
ReplyDeleteIn a just world the likes of Ms Martin and he risk would be facing criminal charges but that's not the world we live in......
"2014 was about momentum, maturity, and meeting milestones for the F-35 program"
ReplyDeleteno--
2014 was about a catastrophic engine failure causing yet unspecified engine redesign, a retarded twenty million line software program and a one year LRIP-8 contract negotiation which includes only four of nine JSF partners procuring faulty prototypes, still at least four years until the Milestone C production decision.
The too-big-to-fail. http://image7.spreadshirt.com/image-server/v1/products/111303967/views/1,width=378,height=378,appearanceId=2/Death-Star---Too-Big-To-Fail-(Star-Wars).jpg
ReplyDelete