By Marina Malenic and Emelie Rutherford
The Air Force’s top uniformed official yesterday expressed continued concern over the delivery schedule for the Pentagon’s next-generation, tri-service fighter aircraft but said the air service has plans in place to mitigate additional schedule slips.
“I need to reemphasize that we’re fully committed to the F-35” Joint Strike Fighter, said Gen. Norton Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff.
“We are a little bit concerned with schedule, and that’s both on the production and the software side,” Schwartz added.
The general was speaking to reporters at a Defense Writers Group breakfast in Washington just one day after the Defense Department’s F-35 program manager, Vice Adm. David Venlet, presented the department’s Defense Acquisition Board with a new “technical baseline review” of the development and testing effort.
Schwartz noted that he was not present at the meeting but said the deep-dive review “is still not complete.”
“There will be another Defense Acquisition Board [meeting] to finalize inputs for the Fiscal ’12 program, which is really what this is all leading up to,” he said.
Other military sources confirmed that a second DAB meeting on the fighter program is expected in the coming weeks.
Pentagon spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Kathleen Kesler confirmed that a second DAB review “will be scheduled at a later date, at which time the resulting program plan will be considered for Milestone B,” which approves a program’s entry into its Engineering and Manufacturing Development phase.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates was briefed early this month on new cost and schedule assessments for the F-35. He was told at the time that delivery of the fighter could be delayed by another one to three years and cost $5 billion more than the most recently released estimates indicate (Defense Daily, Nov. 3). Gates’ spokesman said last week that any changes to the program resulting from the new data would come when the defense chief approves the department’s Fiscal 2012 budget request in February (Defense Daily, Nov. 19).
Lockheed Martin [LMT] is building three versions of the F-35 for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, as well as several foreign militaries. The A model, to be flown by the Air Force, takes off and lands conventionally; the Marine Corps’ B model is a short take-off/vertical landing variant; and the C model is to be flown from carriers by Navy fighter pilots.
A top Air Force official revealed in February that F-35 development and testing delays assessed in 2009 had caused Air Force officials to doubt that the A model would be ready for deployment by 2013 as was planned at that point (Defense Daily, Feb. 22).
Sources now say that the A and C models could be delayed by yet another year, while the more technologically challenging Marine Corps variant could slip three more years.
Last week, Lockheed Martin engineers discovered cracks on a B-model test airframe undergoing durability testing. The company is still working to discover the cause of the problem (Defense Daily, Nov. 19).
Yesterday, Schwartz was upbeat on the Air Force variant’s performance in comparison.
“With respect to the A-model aircraft, my assessment is that, again, it is ahead on test points, it’s ahead on flying hours,” he said. “Software stability has been good, [and]…we have experienced no failures or surprises with respect to the A-model structure.
“Again, the A-model performance to date has been…the best of the lot,” he added.
Still, top Air Force officials have said in recent months that the service is closely studying what mix of modernization efforts will best suit its legacy fighter fleet in case further delays to the F-35 program materialize. They have said that Block 40 and 50 F-16s are being examined on an almost tail-by-tail basis to decide which planes will get communications, radar and navigation updates (Defense Daily, Nov. 10).
Schwartz yesterday reiterated that point.
“We have some alternatives if the schedule doesn’t meet our expectations,” he said.