Fiscal pressures could force the Navy to buy F-35 Joint Strike Fighters at a rate of anywhere between 12 and 20 jets per year starting in 2020, the commander of naval air forces said Aug. 12.
Although the Navy has a goal of purchasing 20 F-35s a year once full-rate production starts in 2020, “I think the realities of the budget environment and other priorities inside the Navy may drive something between those two numbers,” said Vice Adm. Mike Shoemaker at the Center for Strategic and International Studies
The service currently plans to buy 12 F-35s from manufacturer Lockheed Martin [LMT] in 2020, according to projections released in the fiscal year 2016 budget.
Procuring F-35s at a slower rate will put pressure on the service to maintain aging legacy platforms that are in need of service life extensions. However, the Navy is working to ensure the strike fighter fleet remains at a stable level, Shoemaker said.
The Navy won’t introduce the F-35 into its fleet until at least fiscal 2018–almost seven years later than originally planned–which has driven up the flight hours of legacy platforms like the F/A-18C/D Hornet and F/A-18E/F Super Hornet. That combined with the possibility of slower-than-planned F-35 procurement make it even more imperative that the service stay on track with depot work to its Hornet fleet and begin a service life extension program (SLEP) for the Super Hornet as early as 2017, he said.
Issues such as personnel shortfalls and corrosion have slowed the ongoing Hornet SLEP that would increase the life of the jet from 6,000 to more than 8,000 hours. “We didn’t plan it well for the Hornets, but we’re working through that right now in our aviation depots,” he said.
However, Shoemaker is hopeful that lessons learned from repairing the Hornet fleet will feed into the Super Hornet SLEP program, preventing the Navy’s fighter shortfall from becoming worse.
“From applying those things we learned from classic Hornet maintenance work, I think we’ve got a pretty good plan right now to move forward and avoid a significant reduction in the strike fighter inventory as those airplanes come out of service, get repaired and go back into service,” he said. “It’s not an inconsequential challenge we have ahead of us.”
As the first Super Hornets hit 6,000 flight hours, which is expected to occur at the end of 2016, the Navy will begin a service life assessment program with F/A-18 manufacturer Boeing [BA] to evaluate what work on the planes needs to be done.
“We expect we’re probably going to get some help from Boeing…to look at those initial first airplanes that got to 6,000 [flight hours and] make an assessment of what might be repaired, so that we can get ourselves to—as best we can—a standard repair on those airplanes,” Shoemaker said.
Hopefully by then the Navy will have sufficient capacity to begin the Super Hornets SLEP and to keep planes moving and in and out of its depots. As much as a quarter of the fleet could be out of service at any time to get that work done, he added.