Despite feeling “pretty good,” overall about the Air Force successfully reaching its August 2016 initial operational capability (IOC) deadline for the F-35A, the head of the F-35 program is discouraged that an improper level of experienced maintainers in the service for the fleet could put reaching that deadline at risk.
F-35 Program Executive Office (PEO) Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan told reporters Thursday the Air Force is supposed to have a total of 1,100 maintainers of varying experience and skill by 2016 to maintain the F-35As. Bogdan said the Air Force told him that the service anticipated many of the maintainers to come from other aircraft platforms, including the A-10, which the service has tried to cancel many times over the years, only to have Congress block it from doing so. Bogdan said 800 of those 1,100 maintainers were to come over from the A-10 program.
Since the Air Force can’t move those A-10 maintainers to the F-35, Bogdan said the service would be forced to send over younger, more inexperienced, maintainers, who will take longer to certify for work on the F-35, putting the IOC goal at risk.
“The Air Force has an issue now and it’s a real issue for me,” Bogdan said at the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) headquarters in Arlington, Va. “Even if they could give me enough people, it’s still going to take me longer to get them to the right number of maintainers for IOC…It’s not just a numbers issue, it’s a numbers and experienced skill set level issue.”
Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) Member Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), a critic of the Air Force’s attempts to cancel the A-10, disagrees that the service’s inability to retire the Warthog is a key reason for the F-35 maintainer shortage. Ayotte spokeswoman Liz Johnson said Thursday suggesting that the Air Force must prematurely retire the A-10 to fulfill long-anticipated maintenance requirements for the F-35A is a false choice.
“There are a variety of steps the Air Force can take to maintain the combat-proven and cost-efficient A-10, while also providing sufficient maintenance personnel for the F-35A, which is not estimated to reach IOC until 2016,” she said.
F-35 JPO spokeswoman Kyra Hawn clarified in an email after the briefing that Bogdan’s assessment that Air Force IOC is looking good is based on program-level criteria that JPO could affect the development of the aircraft and management of the program. Hawn said the Air Force maintainer inventory, operational demands and future ability to source F-35 squadrons with the “right” mix of junior/senior maintainers is an external factor that may have bearing on Air Force IOC readiness, but is not something the JPO can directly influence.
Bogdan also cautioned that there would be an impact on the number of F-35s the Defense Department would purchase if another round of sequestration-related budget cuts kicked in for 2016. He said it was not yet determined by how much DoD would reduce the buy, but warned that the Navy “can’t go much below two, frankly,” likely referring to the sea service’s planned buy in fiscal year 2016.
Bogdan said the Marine Corps has made it “very, very” clear that it needs “every single airplane” it can get, so that if sequestration hits, the Marine Corps would, in Bogdan’s words, probably do everything they could to keep their quantity as high as possible. The Air Force, Bogdan said, is also fully committed to trying to keep on its procurement ramp.
The Navy on Thursday awarded F-35 engine developer Pratt & Whitney a $793 million contract modification for low-rate initial production (LRIP) Lot 8 of the F135 engine, according to a DoD statement. The contract provides 19 engines for the F-35A, six for the F-35B and four for the F-35C. It also provides four conventional takeoff engines and four short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) engines for international partners as well as eight conventional engines and three spare conventional engines for foreign military sale (FMS) customers.
The Navy also awarded prime contractor Lockheed Martin [LMT] on Thursday a $411 million contract modification for the repair and replenishment of government-owned F-35 assets, including spare parts for the three services and international customers.
The F-35A is the Air Force’s conventional variant. The F-35B is the Marine Corps’ STOVL variant while the F-35C is the Navy’s aircraft carrier variant (CV). The F-35 is developed by Lockheed Martin with subcontractors BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman [NOC]. Pratt & Whitney is a division of United Technologies Corp. [UTX]