The F-35 development program that began 15 years ago is better than 90 percent complete but continues to face delays and cost overruns that will push the completion of flight test into 2018 and cost an extra $267 million.
According to the program schedule set when the program was rebaselined in 2011, flight testing should wrap up by Oct. 31, 2017. Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) chief, has repeatedly told Congress and the press that date has three to four months of wiggle room built in, such that flight testing could extend to February 2018.
“I stand by that assessment today,” Bogdan told reporters Dec. 19 during a press conference at the JPO in Arlington, Va. “The JPO believes that sometime between 1 November 2017 and 28 February 2018, we will have flight testing complete. I am driving my team to finish by that point in time.”
Defense Department chief weapons buyer Frank Kendall has penned a letter to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), explaining that flight testing could extend even further, to May 2018.
“OSD has directed the JPO to continue flight testing as expeditiously as possible, but the end date will be event-driven because we will continue … the development program until all the 3F capabilities are matured, tested and verified as we promised,” Bogdan said. “The JPO has been directed to prepare to add resources to flight testing beyond October of 2017 until May of 2018 if it is necessary to do so.”
Bogdan said he is prepared to retain his workforce and maintain the test fleet of F-35s until May, which would cost about $100 million. He plans to pull funding from the follow-on modernization (FOM) program to pay that bill. There then is a good chance the FOM would in turn be delayed.
“That only makes sense, because if you have to finish … the development program, which is our number-one priority, then you probably wouldn’t want to start FOM anyway. You want to keep those in sync with each other.”
As it stands, completion of the overall F-35 development program will likely cost $532 million above what is currently budgeted, but more than half of that figure is money that was either reprogrammed to pay bills outside the JPO or added cost association with mandated requirements increases.
Of that, $265 million is money that the department took out of the program in 201 to pay other bills and never paid back. Since 2013, added requirements like increased security and a redesign of the aircraft automated maintenance system have cost another $165 million. The remaining $267 million is overrun that resulted from the well-publicized problems the program has experience in recent years, including the redesign of the F-35C arresting hook, a fire that required a fix to the F-135 Pratt & Whitney [UTX] engine and redesign of the pilot helmet.
“That is $267 million that has to be added in to complete this program, budget-wise,” Bogdan said.
Bogdan insists that those overruns be taken in context of the enormous bloat the F-35 program already has overcome. From 2001 to 2011, the program experienced a six-year delay and a $13.5 billion overrun, Bogdan said. Since the 2011 rebaselining, the program is still within then-established objective and threshold dates for delivering the aircraft’s full capability and within a few months of completing flight test on time.
“If anybody would have told us in 2011 that we’d be within a few months and couple hundred million dollars of a $13 billion rebaseline, we would have all slapped the table and said ‘We’ll take it.’”