The first production example of the F-35 has flown.
AF-6 and another production example were scheduled to go to the F-35 training base at Eglin in Florida; near the end of the last fiscal year. Instead, they were delayed. Not only that, these first two production example aircraft will not go to Eglin. They will go out west to Edwards help with the development flight test program which is way behind.
What is left to deliver for the rest of the calendar year? About, 18 more aircraft if this recent story from Aviation Week is accurate.
“One goal to watch will be whether the program can make 20 deliveries this year against a revised schedule adopted in September (four SDD aircraft, one already delivered, and 16 LRIP jets). STOVL sea trials are still planned for this year, as are the first landbased ship suitability tests for the F-35C.”
The program has a mountain of challenges to get over. It has to deliver on all of the over-promise made by the big mouths in marketing. There is a tremendous amount of software that has to work on the aircraft, and people have to actually come forward with money to buy it at its no longer affordable price.
This is a big challenge for the program’s biggest potential buyer, the USAF, which for years, has had a free-ride in not having to throw money at a air-refueling tanker purchase. Now the USAF is committed to the tanker and has no space for anything other than the broken promise of the original low price quoted for the F-35. There is no practical way the USAF will ever see 1763 of this aircraft before they lose interest and can see better things to do with their money. That and the F-35 will not be able to stand up to advanced threats.
Expect to see a few hundred F-35s made before it is cancelled. In short, after all the years of broken promises, this program will never match the PowerPoint slide dreams.
The program may advance some. How it advances is yet to be seen. Anything is possible if you are willing to lower your expectations. For the DOD F-35 program office, that should be their new motto. There are no excess federal dollars sitting around to clean up this mess.
My bet is that the JSF production will reach less than 2000 units total before the line is closed (including units for partners). I would not at all be surprised if the line stops at 1500 or less units. This is assuming that all money commited to the JSF actually goes there. The reduced amount of units to be produced simply reflects higher unit costs (compared to promises) versus a standing budget (assuming no more budget cuts).
My gut feeling is that with military test pilots starting to fly the F-35, we’re going to see more serious “issues” and “problems” crop up requiring more modification and redesigns which will add more to the overall price. I would not be surprised to see the IOC get pushed out to 2020 even for the better F-35A and CV variants.
Higher prices will drive the international partners (nations of the unwilling) to order less aircraft which will act to maintain higher costs per aircraft then LM is forecasting. This is the classic programmatic death spiral that we’ve all seen before.
My guess is that if the JSF program doesn’t get canceled altogether, we’ll see no more then 500 aircraft produced.
Only time will tell…
Guys,
You may like this article. The F-22 will be back.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704476604576158121568592568.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Superraptor,
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As Congress begins to take up the Obama administration’s defense budget, one item not even under discussion needs to be considered. Events of the past 18 months have made clear that it’s time to rethink the fate of the F-22 Raptor. The presumptions that led the Senate to cancel funding for this fighter have been turned upside down, as new threats have emerged and old ones have become clearer.
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The 2012 end of the Obama administration is what needs to be ‘considered’, along with the death of universal medical coverage, open borders and even legal immigration following soon their after. We have a functional 16% unemployment rate (including those who work less than 40hrs a week and wish they could do more). If you include those who have stopped looking because they are better off on welfare, that number exceeds 21%
You can have a welfare state or you can have uncontrolled immigration, you can’t have both.
The American attempt to prove the lie true now ensures we haven’t the monetary controls or debt status to do either. Obama, whose democratic vote base got him into office on a ‘promise them anything!’ condition of trying to fail anyway has destroyed our national fiscal (stimulus) and international diplomatic (Korus and G20/QE2 vs. China) status to the world. Indeed, the entire world thinks The Fed is deliberately suppressing our dollar value (and the interest rates that go with) purely to continue this free ticket to ride as massive debt spending. And they are _100% Correct_. Which is why we should look at another fiat currency to open up the choke and create growth economies if we won’t (truth be told, it’s too late for U.S., according to people like Peter Schiff).
Given 5 trillion of our 13 trillion dollar deficit has been added in the last 4 years, any ‘promises made’ need to be on the basis of assumption that _everything_ done in the last three, wasted, ‘post racial’ years of black entitlement spending to minority businesses and special interests will be overturned.
And we will thereafter start over, 5 trillion deeper in the hole.
Which is to say that Social Security and MCare/MCaid will be next and people with living elderly parents need to think about family consolidation while there is still money to invest in commodities and Asian markets.
Compared to that looming Damocletian outcome, nothing that is mooted in today’s defense budgets of ‘a billion here or there’ means much.
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Defense Secretary Robert Gates has promised that America’s airpower needs will be served by the still-unfinished F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). But that airplane will be smaller, slower and less lethal …
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IT WAS ALWAYS GOING TO BE ‘SMALLER, SLOWER AND LESS LETHAL!’.
Other than gaining a sensor suite which it’s pilot and SFC greedy engine cannot support, the JSF has not changed a lick from it’s initial design parameters as a 21st Century F-16 with F-117 stealth and 2,000lb class weapons bay. While there is a lot of reason to suspect that that was -never- a really great combination (hammer class munitions are anachronisms when you have 2.65m average JDAM miss distances and are fighting guerilla threats without bunkers), what -has- changed is the notional abilities of heavy weight fighters to do both the lightweight fill-force mission (Hello AMRAAM) and the deep-strike, multi-target one (hello glide IAMs) with multicarriage and better LO.
So now let’s look at Europe. We just killed MEADS. We just killed KC-45. We are carrying a lot of anger over Iraq the false ratings on the realestate mortgages that turned hedge funds into junk bonds and killed six banks P&E stability. They are just now waking up to the cost of losing national identity to the very Islamic hordes we are asking them to help us fight in SWA.
We cannot expect anymore ‘charity’ from Europe.
At home, we are talking about entering into another flat-budget era with a half trillion dollar ‘consolidation cycle’ about to smack our small defense contractor base in the teeth as the innovator portion of an already tightened up defense market that can least afford it (see ‘Shrink to Fit’ on the last page of the present AvLeak).
All the while, we STILL haven’t done Job #1 which is to _downsize from the Cold War_ the existing force structure metric as a function of remissioning what is left. Starting with pullback from NATO, Korea and SWA (since they won’t go get UBL or even see if he’s still there). And followed by building a bloody fence on our borders before the Mexican Drug War takes root, _here_!
It would be just too damn bad if we pulled another Rome with collapsing internal economies and a fully expanded foreign garrison structure as the sole justification of why we still considered ourselves a nation state when the lights went out and the barbarian hordes started roving the streets. Because we let them in. The only thing worse would be mass WMD smuggled in across an open Texas/Arizona/California invitation.
We are at that level people. We need to fix ourselves before we can return to the world.
Our finances cannot support sustaining the old or building the new defense models (if we actually have one, which I doubt). Let alone both. And those who mistakenly thought that ‘defense alone’ would prop up the nation as export so long as we propped up the F-35 longe enough to start making sales need to get a grip:
Europe will not pay 127-142 million a pop to have an F-117 with afterburner. By the time the U.S. purchases of early (low capability) lots take down the price, this nation will be bankrupt and the point will be moot.
The heads of the top 10 banks in the world agree with me. Why doesn’t Congress or the White House?
Because they weren’t hired to save America for Americans but to continue the push to destroy nationalism as a precursor to globalism. Spending us to death is not in the best defense interests of our nation. But it certainly keeps ‘volume’ of trade flow going for commercial interests. Until a replacement can be found for U.S..
the F-35 will be competing UCAVs, who
- cost half as much or less
- have better range
- have lower operating cost (known engines especially)
- are stealthier
- can stay over an area for days on end
- don’t expose a pilot/risk him defecting
- can be launched from carriers too
- same ground-attack capability in stealth configuration
- great air-to-air potential
why would the US pay pay $100 million minimum for an aircraft with poorer performance? one which will be outmatched by next-generation SAM systems by the time it becomes operational?
why would other countries, like Japan or the EU buy such an aircraft, when they can have the Neuron/Taranis/UCAS-N/Phantom Ray at half the price?