By BLOOMBERG January 24, 2018
Efforts to improve the reliability of Lockheed Martin
Corp.’s F-35 are “stagnant,” undercut by problems such as aircraft sitting idle
over the last year awaiting spare parts from the contractor, according to the
Pentagon’s testing office.
The availability of the fighter jet for missions when
needed — a key metric — remains “around 50 percent, a condition that has
existed with no significant improvement since October 2014, despite the
increasing number of aircraft,” Robert Behler, the Defense Department’s new
director of operational testing, said in an annual report delivered Tuesday to
senior Pentagon leaders and congressional committees.
The F-35 section, obtained by Bloomberg News, outlined
the status of the costliest U.S. weapons system as it’s scheduled to end its
16-year-old development phase this year. Starting in September, the program is
scheduled to proceed to intense combat testing that’s likely to take a year, an
exercise that’s at least 12 months late already. Combat testing is necessary
before the plane is approved for full-rate production — the most profitable
phase for Lockheed.
Pentagon officials including Deputy Defense Secretary
Patrick Shanahan and chief weapons buyer Ellen Lord have highlighted the need
to reduce the F-35’s $406.5 billion projected acquisition cost and its
estimated $1.2 trillion price tag for long-term operations and support through
2070. Still, the Defense Department is moving to accelerate contracting and
production for the fighter despite the persistence of technical and reliability
issues disclosed in the current phase of development testing.
Spare Parts, Tires
Those issues include the increasing number of planes that
are down awaiting spare parts, difficulties with the electro-optical targeting
system and flaws in launching air-to-air missiles and GPS-guided air-to-ground
munitions during weapons testing.
A final version of the plane’s complex software has gone
through 31 variations and has yet to be deployed because of “key remaining
deficiencies,” the report found. The troubles also include more mundane issues,
such as tires on the Marine Corps version of the plane, the F-35B, that are
proving less than durable.
The upcoming testing, “which provides the most credible
means to predict combat performance, likely will not be completed until”
December 2019, according to the testing office.
By the end of testing designed to demonstrate that the
F-35 is operationally effective and suitable for its missions more than 600
aircraft already will have been built. That’s about 25 percent of a planned
2,456 U.S. jets; 265 have been delivered to date.
Joe DellaVedova, spokesman for the Pentagon’s F-35
program office, and Lockheed spokeswoman Carolyn Nelson had no immediate
comment on the new testing office report.
In an earlier statement, Nelson said Lockheed’s 66 F-35
deliveries in 2017 represented “more than a 40 percent increase from 2016, and
the F-35 enterprise is prepared to increase production volume year-over-year to
hit full rate of approximately 160 aircraft in 2023.”
Original post: fortune.com
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