FORT WORTH, Texas–More than two decades ago, the Pentagon Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) approved key performance parameters (KPPs) for the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) that set the availability rate at more than 90 percent.
The U.S. Navy variant availability requirement was slightly lower because of the longer sorties forecast for that variant, while the Air Force variant was in the middle, and the Marine Corps the highest of the three because of its forecast of shorter sorties.
Today, the availability rates of the three variants of the Lockheed Martin
[LMT] F-35 assembled in Fort Worth are significantly below the KPPs, but the company says it is moving to increase the rates through various means, including the possible award and implementation of a DoD Performance Based Logistics (PBL) contract this year.
“So, we’re producing 150 jets a year,” said Edward “Stevie” Smith, Lockheed Martin’s director of F-35 domestic business development and a retired Navy F/A-18 pilot. “I need my suppliers to have parts for not only those new airplanes but also the anticipated repair that we want to build in there. And that’s where a PBL is gonna give them [the F-35 parts suppliers] some certainty. We’ll give you five years of certainty that we’re going to need that type of capacity, and that’s going to incentivize them to increasing their repair capacity.”
Lockheed Martin has reported lingering supply chain/parts availability effects due to COVID-19, but Smith said that the company’s F-35 team anticipated supplier delays and forward funded many suppliers to keep them open.
Lockheed Martin aims to achieve a peak production of 156 F-35s per year–a far cry from the JSF capacity DoD envisioned more than 20 years ago of producing one JSF per day to meet domestic and foreign demands.
The F-35 became operational in July 2015.
Lockheed Martin plans to turn out its 1,000th F-35 by the end of this year on the one-mile, 20-foot-long assembly line here at Air Force Plant 4 from which planes have rolled off since the B-24 Liberator bomber in 1942 (Defense Daily, April 12).
The F-35 production process is a complex, interwoven one that depends upon the contributions of at least 1,650 suppliers–about 1,000 small businesses and other contractors, including Northrop Grumman [NOC] for the center fuselage and BAE Systems for the aft fuselage.
While 30,000 workers here churned out planes during WWII, the Lockheed Martin Fort Worth presence still counts about 17,000, including 2,774 F-35 touch labor mechanics represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) District 776, which ratified a new four-year contract with Lockheed Martin on April 24 last year.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has led DoD to emphasize ramping up surge capacity, especially for munitions, to boost fielded quantities rapidly. Airpower advocates have made the case that surge capacity should apply to U.S. tactical aircraft fleets as well to guarantee U.S. and allied air dominance against possible high-tech foes like Russia and China. After the Russian onslaught in Ukraine, three European countries signed F-35 contracts–Finland, Switzerland, and Germany, while the Czech Republic and Greece are considering the fighter for their nations.
With production surge capacity comes the need for high mission capability (MC) and availability rates. In the fall of 2018, then Defense Secretary James Mattis announced an MC rate mandate for the Pentagon’s tactical aircraft fleet of 80 percent after DoD found that such MC rates–the percentage of ready aircraft in operational squadrons–were around 50 percent.
At the time of the announcement of the 80 percent MC rate mandate, since rescinded, “every service component lead said, ‘If you want 80 percent, you’ve got to fund 80 percent,’ and it’s gonna cost in parts, really, and in maintainers–people to do that work,” Smith said. “I think it’s really getting the right level of readiness at the right time. I think most of our deployed operations for F-35A, B, and C have all operated in that 80 to 90 percent mission capability rate for entire deployments, and we’re talking eight and a half month deployments to carriers, amphibious ships, and deployed in theater.”
JSF was to include the supply of quality, durable parts and a ready backlog of parts on the shelf to provide maintenance for squadrons. In the past, tactical aircraft squadrons have flown 300 hours per month and have aircraft that flew some 30 or more hours per month.
A report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) in February said that between 2021 and 2022 F-35As’ availability fell by 11 percentage points, while F-35Bs’ availability fell by 7 percentage points, and F-35Cs’ availability rose by 5 percentage points.
Last year, availability rates ranged from 54 percent for the F-35A and F-35B to 58 percent for the F-35C, CBO said. Availability rates are calculated by dividing the number of hours that aircraft are both mission capable and in the possession of operational squadrons by the total number of aircraft hours for the entire fleet, including aircraft undergoing depot-level maintenance.
Repairing stealthy aircraft, such as the F-35 and the Lockheed Martin F-22, may involve removing and then reapplying stealth coatings–a process that lengthens repair time and decreases aircraft availability rates.
“The Air Force has been out there and quoted and touted that their LO [low observability] signature and health of their LO system was better when they got back from their deployment than when they left,” Smith said on Apr. 12. “That was because they were manned to be able to do all that LO maintenance when they were underway [on deployment].”
CBO said that the availability rate of an F-35A with five years of age was around 40 percent, while an F-22 of that age had an availability rate of more than 50 percent, and an F-15E of more than 70 percent. In addition, while F-15Es recorded about 25 flying hours per month at five years of age, F-22s and F-35As of the same age recorded about half that number.
“It’s a nuanced question,” Smith said in answer to what availability and mission capability rates F-35s should have.
“There’s a lot of elements that go into providing that [availability and mission capability],” he said. “What job does Lockheed play? Our job is to provide a reliable airplane, and we’re working on that every year…our ability to get the right parts there at the right time and the prognostic health monitoring of determining when a part is gonna be up for removal and replacement and trying to limit the downtime that maintenance requires. We do a lot with artificial intelligence to look at the trends and go, ‘Hey, that part’s design failure rate or maintenance rate’s about a 200 hour depot point or a point so we know that airplane is gonna be down and that part’s about right so it might be time to pull that part. So we’re putting a lot of effort into that to reduce the downtime and increase that mean time between repairs. That’s what we have to do.”
“Parts availability is another one, providing for supply,” he said. “How much do we increase making parts available on the shelf, and that’s where Lockheed can play a role. We’re pursuing a PBL contract this year, and it is a supply side PBL, and we’re working that time to getting that part on the shelf. What don’t we own? We don’t own that maintainer’s decision of when they’re gonna bring that airplane down to repair it, but a lot of times what we find across the fleet is, yeah, the airplane might need that part. We’ve got a degraded sensor [for example], but guess what? Because it’s an F-35, I’ve got six more sensors that are operating and applying a four ship that have all those sensors in there providing them that data so they will fly an airplane in a not fully mission capable state because, as a package, they are combat capable.”
“And so their decision to put off that maintenance might affect that rate, but it really doesn’t matter,” Smith said. “They’re putting effects down range. So I think it’s a cost thing. We probably don’t want to pay for 100 percent availability. That’s really not achievable. You’re not going to achieve it with your car, as it is. I think there is that fine line of what you need to fully fund. And I think it’s an industry and DoD combined effort, whether it’s depot stand ups to have repair capacity at our DoD depots around the nation, as well as OEM supplier repair capacity, and we’re working out as part of the PBL to that and what is that right level of standing up depots and then look at the parts laying in those depots but at the same time making sure our suppliers have repair capacity.”
The F-35 program is moving to field the Operational Data Integrated Network (ODIN)–a cloud-based, government-owned logistics software system to replace the more than two decade-old Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS).
While Lockheed Martin has owned ALIS data rights, the F-35 program has said that the federal government will have the data rights to ODIN.
A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report last August said that it was unclear when ODIN would become operational (Defense Daily, Aug. 22, 2022).
Between July 2021 and January 2022, the F-35 program and Lockheed Martin fielded the first 14 sets of new, unclassified logistics information hardware, the ODIN base kit (OBK), for F-35 operational squadrons, the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) has said (Defense Daily, Jan. 31, 2022).
The installations replaced the ALIS Standard Operating Unit-Unclassified server. The OBKs at the 12 locations complete “the initial phase of ODIN hardware rollout, replacing all first-generation unclassified ALIS servers in the field,” the JPO said.
The Air Force’s fiscal 2023 budget request said that ODIN software would begin to field in F-35 squadrons by the end of this year (Defense Daily, Apr. 25, 2022). The Air Force’s fiscal 2024 request was consistent with that estimate and said that ODIN software fielding would begin in the third quarter of this year and end in the first quarter of 2025.
The OBKs “took the two racks of huge servers that ALIS was down to something that was 20 percent the footprint,” Smith said on Apr. 12. “That’s been really successful. At the same time, we implemented some pretty good changes to ALIS that now runs on that ODIN Base Kit…Over the next several years, we’ll be rolling out that new ODIN software. That’s the next step, finishing out rolling out ODIN hardware and hosting that new software design.”
On Apr. 17, Lockheed Martin said that the company “has begun the ALIS-to-ODIN transition with the initial ODIN software expected to field in 2025.”
“Lockheed Martin is the system integrator for the ODIN software,” the company said. “Additionally, we are the prime software developer and we also work with subcontractors. The initial ODIN software will be designed to enable quicker testing and more rapid fielding of capability updates. ODIN will improve data quality and cybersecurity, increase access to data, and modernize messaging and data flows to align with the modernized system architecture.”
The Air Force said in its budget request that plans for fiscal 2024 were to complete “ALIS to ODIN software containerization efforts and development of foundational infrastructure for software and data modernization to increase user capability. ”
In addition, the Air Force said that its fiscal 2024 goals were to “continue development of the Linux platform and ODIN data architecture; finalize current generation hardware update, continue analysis of alternatives on
next-generation hardware tech insertion supporting ODIN development and test plan as well as capability
requirements that are not currently encompassed in the baseline equipment; optimize the ODIN cloud-based
infrastructure while continuing migration and modernization of the ODIN enterprise; leverage the establishment
of modern software architecture from Unclassified development efforts to develop and release the Classified
portion of the F-35 Maintenance Systems ODIN enterprise; [and] develop and deploy improved capabilities to replace legacy applications.”