By Emelie Rutherford

Air Force leaders told Senate authorizers yesterday they personally support funding a second-engine program for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), citing cost as the sole rationale for the effort’s absence from the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2009 requested budget.

In recent years, like this year, the Department of Defense (DoD) has not requested funding for the General Electric [GE]-Rolls-Royce F136 propulsion system to serve as an alternative to the Pratt & Whitney [UTX] F135 engine for the future JSF. Yet lawmakers have consistently added the money for the second-engine effort, keeping it alive.

Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) yesterday quizzed Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley on whether the alternate engine program should be cancelled.

“I would tell you that’s a very tough decision, but [my] personal opinion is I would keep it alive,” Wynne replied during the SASC hearing on the Air Force’s FY ’09 budget.

Moseley, emphasizing his support for the president’s and Pentagon’s budget proposals, said he also personally supports the second-engine effort. However, Moseley said he is concerned adding funding for it would drain monies from other facets of the three-variant JSF effort.

“We’re all very sensitive to fielding that airplane on time,” the general said. “Any larger programmatic cut inside that program puts those IOC [initial operational capability] times at risk; that’s the sensitivity.”

When Sen. John Warner (R-Va.), SASC ranking member, asked if that means to look elsewhere for the second-engine funds, Moseley said he would like help in protecting the IOC dates on the three JSF variants.

The JSF program–which is developing variants for the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy–is the Air Force’s largest acquisition program. Warner cited the second-engine debate as “a significant budget issue” for lawmakers to wade through.

Wynne said the issue with the second-engine program boils down to affordability, noting the effort “failed the business case, and so it did not get into the budget.”

Yet he questioned if the business case should be applied to the JSF effort, for which the United States has partnerships with nine other countries’ air services.

“If you go to a single airplane for eight, nine, 10 nations, then the question is, does it have to pass a business case in order to just be an investment in uber-reliability,” Wynne said.

“The question of how much reliability should you have if it is your only air-dominant air fleet available to you is yet a question that has not really been asked, and it is where I came down on the side of continuing the investment at the point,” he added.

He also noted the advantages of having “competitive forces at work” on the engines.

Wynne pointed to the benefits of having alternate aircraft in the Air Force. The service, he said, was fortunate to have F-16 fighters available to use after F-15s were stood down because of cracking.

When the F-15 problems arose, Moseley had to ensure international partners that “America in fact produced very high-reliable craft,” Wynne said.

He also noted that on the shuttle there are multiple redundancies “that would not make a business case, they only made a strategic-reliability case.”

“And so you’ve got to look at what is America doing [with JSF] in involving nine countries and essentially taking positions on an affordability basis and not looking at the statistics for reliability,” Wynne said.

Moseley cited problems with a blade on the Pratt & Whitney engine as a reason for having the alternate program.

Last month an engine blade for the JSF’s F-35B short takeoff vertical landing (STOVL) variant, to be used by the Marine Corps, failed during proof testing (Defense Daily, Feb. 11, 2006).

While Wynne said the Pratt & Whitney engine is “doing a great job,” he said the service expects “problems downstream, because this is an aircraft program and this is an engine program.”