...As Do Concerns About New Fighter

With the maiden flight of the first F-35 Joint Strike Fighter prototype still months away, skeptics are loudly questioning whether Lockheed Martin can deliver the fighter without significant technical issues, ever-longer delays, and cost overruns higher than what the project is already over budget.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports Pentagon officials now project a $276.5 billion total cost for developing the fighter, and for purchasing 2,500 of the aircraft for the US and British armed forces. That's $20 billion more than an estimate done in January 2004... and $75 billion more than was originally forecast when the program was launched in October 2001.

And that may not be the worst of it, critics say, as the F-35 program is still young... and a lot of work remains to be done to perfect the aircraft's high-tech systems. Congress has already allocated funding to begin work of the first seven "production" aircraft, although flight tests on such a production-spec aircraft won't occur until 2008 at the earliest.

"Our message is they still have a lot of risks in these things until they fly the airplane," Michael Sullivan, an acquisition analyst for the Government Accounting Office, said. "There are technologies they're counting on that have not been tested yet." 

The GAO recently urged Congress to rein in spending on the F-35 until Lockheed and its contractors show they can build the fighter they promised -- essentially, put up or shut up.

Officials involved with the program acknowledge the hardest times are yet to come in the development of the F-35... and those hurdles have little to do with the actual first flight of the plane.

"I've told everyone we'll work to August [flight date], but we'll fly when we're ready," said Rear Admiral Steven Enewold, the top military official overseeing the program. "We don't want to rush to make a first flight and then have something bad happen."

"I'm fairly comfortable through first flight and through the end of this year," Enewold added. "After that, the risks [of encountering major technical obstacles] get bigger."

As Aero-News reported in February, that first flight (tentatively slated for late August at this time) will involve a conventional take-off-and-landing version of the F-35 -- the most "normal" variant of the fighter. A VTOL version of the F-35 -- one that can take off and land vertically -- is also in the works, to replace the aging AV-8 Harrier.

Enewold told the Star-Telegram indications are that Lockheed and its contractors -- BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman -- can successfully produce the components needed for the test planes and early production fighters -- and ""we're not going to have to do a bunch of scrap and rework."

Even if that proves to be the case, however, there's one added cost Lockheed, its contractors, and the military can't do anything about: the rising costs of metals and other materials needed for the jet. "We're seeing 200 percent increases in aluminum, 500 percent in titanium," Enewold said. "That's a big issue."

But the GAO maintains the real potential of huge cost increases lies in the program's plans to begin building production airplanes before most of the flight testing is done on all versions of the F-35.

Should production have to be halted to make design changes -- as Sullivan says has happened in many other programs -- "is a huge driver of costs."

"To us, it's measure twice, cut once," Sullivan said.

FMI: www.gao.gov, www.lockheedmartin.com