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Subject:
Impending collapse of U.S. tactical aviation procurement
Phaid
6/6/2009 1:59:31 PM
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The U.S. Air Force announced this week that it will "review" its requirement for 1,763 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters during the comprehensive Quadrennial Defense Review which is now under way. According to Air Force Chief of Staff Norton Schwartz, the number of F-35s "could end up being less," he said, but he expects to have "well over" 1,500 F-35s. This nonetheless reflects a potential reduction of 200 or more F-35s from the Air Force procurement alone.
Meanwhile, the JSF program executive officer (PEO)Marine Corps Brig. Gen. David Heinz, stated in an interview with Aviation Week that funding for the F136 alternate engine must be stopped because there is not enough money in the budget to both fund the engine development and produce the expected number of F-35s. According to Heinz, continuing the F136 procurement would "take 50-80 tails out of the program" at a critical early stage of LRIP production, which would cause the unit price to rise, and cause the program to collapse as international partners pull out. "I worry about taking tails out of the program because it will get so expensive the partners will start to pull back", said Heinz.
Heinz's concerns illustrate just how much of a financial knife's edge the F-35 program is already riding. The F136 development contract was awarded in 2005 and is scheduled to end in 2013. This means the F136 development has annual cost of $300 million. According to these numbers, three hundred million dollars per year is the difference between success and failure of a tactical aviation program that has completed less than 5% of flight testing.
But now, even notwithstanding the F136 engine, the Air Force already looking at reducing F-35 procurement numbers, which again means the unit price will necessarily go up. And the Air Force' potential reductions will be much larger, and have far more of an effect on the unit price, than the ones Heinz is concerned about due to the F136. The fewer airplanes are purchased, the more unit price goes up; the more unit price goes up, the less orders will be placed, resulting in a death spiral. And the ripple effects will be devastating: the Navy was criticized this week in Congressional hearings for buying too few F/A-18s in order to make room in their budget for future F-35 purchases. At the same time, the Air Force, which has put off recapitalizing its fighter fleet for two decades, recently decided to retire 250 tactical aircraft ahead of schedule in order to save money to buy more F-35s.
All of those cuts and procurement reductions are based on current F-35 cost estimates and current F-35 production numbers. As testing and budgets impact the F-35 production rates, and the number of airframes purchased continue to dwindle, it is becoming clear that the services are sacrificing their fighter fleets to fund an airplane that will never be procured in enough numbers to meet their needs. |
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