What went wrong with the F-35

[JustJohn or JJ]

What went wrong with the F-35

Discussion in 'Air Warfare'
by A.P. Richelieu, Today at 12:39 AM.



Interesting Comment.

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I am writing as anonymous because I was a Lockheed Martin employee and executive for over 30-years and I was also intimately involved with the F-22 and the F-35 program. My anonymity is because I’ve witnessed other former Lockheed employees who have criticized the company and the program experience certain “issues”. I don’t need to suddenly have my pension stop, or get audited for multiple years by the IRS. I am writing a book on the financial and criminal misconduct of the Military-Industrial- Congressional complex and I am doing so under a pen name. This is a short sample of some of the information in that book.

First, the Joint Strike Fighter(F-35) requirements came from 11 different countries and 3 US military services. It was advertised as a clean sheet of paper design for a true fifth gen fighter. The old adage about using a committee to design a horse and you wind up with a camel is true. Only this time it’s a turd, not a camel. The pilots who fly it call it the Turd. It is more than a turd - it is an accident waiting to happen and one day it will take the life of a brave American pilot just like the F-22 has. For example, I was there the day they had to use a chain saw to cut open the canopy of the first test jet to get the pilot out because it wouldn’t open. He was sitting there in the Ft Worth 100+ degree sun literally baking alive. They towed the jet into a hangar but he was still cooking. He had to be lifted out through the hole and rushed to the medical center to be re hydrated using IV. Never saw that on the evening news, did you? The AC system on the jet quit working during the test flight because of a faulty part from one of the way too many subcontractors who sold crappy parts to Lockheed so, with cockpit temps soaring above 100 degrees, he aborted the test flight and RTB’d only to find that the canopy wouldn’t open. Not an easy day. Why did Lockheed buy crappy parts you ask? Another old adage applies here: Follow the money. Congressional pressure/influence coupled with poor processes and procedures and a cost cutting mentality because of a Firm, Fixed Price contract well over $200B for an unproven aircraft using high risk immature technologies. Gee, what could possibly go wrong?

Let’s follow the money: You see; the program is one of the largest political pork programs in the history of the US. That’s why it will never be cancelled. It has lined the pockets of Republicans and Democrats, ensured their re-elections and made $MM’s for their contractor cronies and is probably the best example of bipartisan politics in recent history. Boondoggle is a kind term. This has to be considered criminal. People are afraid that if Donald Trump becomes president, he’ll start investigating things like this because he’s not an insider and he will make them pay – a novel concept.

The 11 countries were there just for show and as potential buyers for the trumped up business cases. We (the US government and Lockheed) gave them the illusion of importance. The early meetings I was involved in never ever took the clean sheet of paper approach - NFW. Everyone was overwhelmed by the steaming pile of requirements and so basically just ignored them and used the 3 US military services. We were at the Paris Airshow one year and I remember one exec saying something like “those assholes (foreign countries) will buy anything we make and if they don’t like it, then they can go buy some piece of nuts MIG or Dassault”. The US Air Force and Lockheed already had the design. Remember that Boeing was in the competition with their version - called Miss Piggy by some and Monica by others because of the gaping air intake and big nose (yes, it was around that time when Ole Bill and Monica got caught exchanging DNA samples in the Oval Orifice). The program was being run by the USAF, who has dictated fighter design for years. The 11 countries and Navy and USMC? Well, the USAF was just being nice and inclusive but at the end of the day, GEN Jumper and the fly boys went with what they knew, and that was the F-22 heritage. Lockheed execs did a masterful job of convincing them that they could re-use much of the F-22 design. Look at a picture of a Raptor and a Turd flying together. Tell the difference? Subtle details but most obviously the Raptor has 2 engines and the Turd has one.

Background: In 2006, congress and the DOD, in a rare moment of intelligent clarity and bipartisanship concern for the tax payer, cancelled the F-22,whose costs were spiraling out of control. The Raptor also had known problems and issues; most notably the pilot oxygen system, which has never been totally fixed and cost at least one pilot his life. I was in the company of some Raptor pilots about a year ago and they still have the infamous “Raptor cough”, a dry hacking sound. Ask yourself why the Raptor has never been used in combat. The real answer is that it takes so much time, effort and money to keep the jets flying and so it can’t sustain the sortie rates required for major combat ops.Back then Lockheed and the USAF were deeply invested in the F-22; financially and emotionally. We knew that it was on the chopping block, so the USAF and Lockheed did a full court press. Lockheed wanted to sell more jets and the USAF wanted to buy more jets. It was a classic example of the self-licking ice cream cone. We jointly performed huge multi million dollar warfare modeling and simulation studies using worst case scenarios of what would happen if a peer competitor country that may start with the letter C were to launch a major all-out attack against the US. We needed to build the case for more F-22’s and so we started with the answer and backed into the analysis results to say “See, we need 200 more jets or we’re all gonna f#*king die!” Congress and the DOD amazingly saw through the ruse and so it got cancelled. That may have been that last intelligent thing congress and the DOD ever did before the liberal crazies took over and now spend more time worrying about legislating transgender bathrooms, having women in Special Forces and registering our guns instead of enforcing the laws that are already in place.

So Lockheed had a huge amount of sunk costs in jigs, tooling and components for the F-22. Reusing the F-22 design would leverage those sunk costs, saving millions in startup and production costs – or so went the line of reasoning. Good idea, bad assumption, very poorly executed. Remember: Firm, fixed price.Which translates to: save money every which way you can and be the low bidder.Use less people and short cut processes was where it hit the fan. Who needs to pay a group of engineers to create a test plans? We don’t need no stinking test plans! Processes and documentation take a hit and quality goes down the toilet. A huge rift developed between Lockheed and the USAF/government and continues to this day. Budgets and schedules ran amok. People were fired or quit when they complained. Technical debt piled up on the I&T side of the V model. Agile processes were introduced on top of an already abbreviated the V model. The leaner we tried to run, the slower we got. Confusion and paranoia settled in at Ft Worth. Then corporate wide layoffs started due to Sequestration. Key technical people were laid off and replaced with new hires. The top execs were so out of touch with what was happening in the trenches it was pathetic. Mismanagement at all levels. They brought in some new execs during a major house cleaning back in 2012 but it still hasn’t helped much. Too little, too late. The F-35 is still a Turd and always will be. It has not nor ever will perform as claimed. Most likely it will suffer even more from maintenance issues than the F-22. And I fear that someday soon, that piss poor excuse for a fighter jet will cost the life of another brave American pilot. During this time, that peer competitor country that starts with C(hina) and Russia have developed their 5th gen fighters and some analysts say they perform better than the F-35 ever will in many aspects. I sort of chuckle when I see the Chinese fighter obviously patterned after the F-22 but with forward canards. Asian countries love to pattern their stuff after the West but with their own twists. Ok, China, go ahead and steal our technology - the jokes on you this time. Canards? So cold war.

But that’s just one program and there is more and it keeps getting worse but wait for the book. It’ll really piss you off.

[JustJohn or JJ]

Lockheed's F-22 Raptor – a maintenance nightmare

July 11, 2009 Defense Bureau
Posted on 7/14/2009, 7:58:32 AM


With a whistle blower lawsuit against Lockheed Martin grabbing headlines for making the startling allegation that the US Air Force's top-of-the-line fighter, the F-22 Raptor, has been supplied defective stealth coatings, further information is now emerging from Pentagon sources that the F-22 program is indeed the source of substantial worry for the defence establishment.

Internal documents, as well as Pentagon officials, reveal that Lockheed Martin's F-22 now requires more than 30 hours of maintenance for every hour that it spends in the skies. This adverse ratio effectively pushes its hourly cost of flying to more than $44,000, which easily outstrips the cost of keeping other fighters in the skies – those which the Raptor is meant to replace.

Seemingly lending credence to whistle blower ex-employee Darrol Olsen's claims, that the company knowingly used "coatings that Lockheed knew were defective," are reports that not only are these coatings susceptible to peeling off but also that they are vulnerable to rains and other abrasion. Olsen claims that Lockheed covered up its problem with defective coatings by applying 272kg (600lb) worth of extra layers.

Pentagon sources say that these problems have been bedeviling the aircraft since the mid-1990s. (See: Lawsuit claims Lockheed's F-22 Raptor has defective stealth coatings )

Local media reports reveal that even as most aircraft fleets become easier and less costly to repair as they mature, the reverse is the case with the F-22. On an average, the Defense Department acknowledged this week, just 55 per cent of the deployed F-22 fleet was available to fulfil stipulated missions in the period from October last year to this May.

The F-22 has never flown in combat missions over Iraq or Afghanistan.

A litany of complaints

The Raptor has become a contentious issue between the US Congress and the Obama administration with defence secretary Robert Gates halting further production of the $138 million aircraft, beyond the stipulated 187.

This is far short of what the USAF and the contractors had anticipated.

Defense officials in the know have been quoted in the media as saying that the aircraft can just about manage 1.7 hours of hassle-free flying before contracting a 'critical' ailment other point out that the Cold War-era conceived fighter has, so far, cost an average of $350 million apiece and are just not a priority in an age of small wars and terrorist threats.

The massive maintenance bills are also draining away air force funds urgently required for other projects. Former top Pentagon weapons testing expert Thomas Christie (2001-2005) has been quoted as saying that the plane's huge costs has resulted in the Air Force lacking funds to modernize its other components adequately. He said the force has "embarked on what we used to call unilateral disarmament."

According to Pierre Sprey, one of the founding members of the so-called ''fighter mafia'' – the group that conceived America's most successful modern combat aircraft, the F-15, the F-16, and the A-10 - from the beginning, the Air Force designed the Raptor to be "too big to fail, that is, to be cancellation-proof."

Prime contractor Lockheed farmed out more than 1,000 subcontracts to vendors in more than 40 US states, and Sprey points out that by the time skeptics "could point out the failed tests, the combat flaws, and the exploding costs, most Congressmen were already defending their subcontractors' " revenues.

Media reports quote John Hamre, Pentagon comptroller (1993-1997), as saying that the DoD approved the plane with a very low budget as it knew projecting the real costs would have bounced the project on Capitol Hill.

"We knew that the F-22 was going to cost more than the Air Force thought it was going to cost and we budgeted the lower number, and I was there," Hamre told the Senate Armed Services Committee in April.

"I'm not proud of it," Hamre is quoted as saying in a recent interview.

The aircraft has undergone a plethora of problems, in line with the radical nature of its design it must be said. For the USAF, the sad part is that the problems have failed to stabilize in spite of near six squadrons already deployed in active service.

With limited production commencing in 2001, the plane was "substantially behind its plan to achieve reliability goals," the GAO said in a report the following year. Structural problems compelled forced retrofits to the frame and changes in the fuel flow. Computer flaws, combined with defective software diagnostics, forced the frequent retesting of millions of lines of code, according to two Defence officials quoted in a local media report.

Stealth coating problems, which often require re-gluing small surfaces, as the coating peels off, take more than a day to dry. These facts have been culled from confidential data drawn from tests conducted by the Pentagon's independent Office of Operational Test and Evaluation between 2004 and 2008.

Over this four-year period, the Raptor's average maintenance time per hour of flight grew from 20 hours to 34. Stealth coatings alone accounted for more than half of the maintenance time, and more than half the hourly flying costs last year, according to the test and evaluation office.

While the Air Force claims that the F-22 cost $44,259 per flying hour in 2008, the Office of the Secretary of Defense said the figure was $49,808.

The F-15, the F-22's predecessor, has a fleet average cost of $30,818.

Sprey has also claimed that he was informed by engineers who have worked on the aircraft that because of Lockheed's use of hundreds of subcontractors, quality control was so poor that workers had to create a "shim line" at the Georgia plant where they retooled badly designed or poorly manufactured components.

"Each plane wound up with all these hand-fitted parts that caused huge fits in maintenance," Sprey said. "They were not interchangeable."

Lockheed denies such claims, however, and says "our supplier base is the best in the industry."

The plane's famed 'gold canopy' a million-dollar, radar-absorbing cause of envy for other fighter pilots has also caused problems. A stuck hatch imprisoned a pilot for hours in 2006 and, to date, engineers have been unable to extend the canopy's lifespan beyond about 18 months of flying time.

Ex-Pentagon official Ahern and Air Force Gen CD Moore, have both confirmed that canopy visibility has been declining more rapidly than envisaged, forcing $120,000 of repairs at 331 hours of average flying time, instead of the stipulated 800 hours.

The plane's first operational flight test in September 2004 saw it meet two of 22 key requirements and display a total of 351 deficiencies. In 2006, it fully met five, and in 2008 when the sixth squadron was fully deployed, the Raptor had fully met seven key requirements.

Pentagon officials stress that the F-22s are on track to meet all its key performance parameters by next year.

[karl]

Yes,, it appears such a waste of tax payers money, and perhaps it is, but this is the way the Pentagon works, even as flawed as it appears.

Once the weapon is introduced as a viable solution{s} to a situational problem, once then to proceed through the processes of examination of various services {Army, Navy, Marines and Airforce} the needs of each service has presented each as its own, analyses of need and if the weapon {F-22/F-35} programme will fill its need{s}, then each service then presents required modifications to fit the needs that would if any, require the modifications as required.

With each modification, will commensuratly up the price of engineering the modification against required stated performance to suit each individual service requirement.

A lengthy process of time/cost and manufacturing time delay. Time is money to both the Pentagon and the manufacturier. For perhaps not provided, is the cost to the manufacturer to produce a small number to test machines for demonstration and display of the real thing to members of the Pentagon responsible as a representative of the service indicated.

The primary prerequisite is: Does the machine function as asked for? Does it fit the requirement as specified? Can the machine be produced withen the time required? The presenting manufacturiers time line of production versus any delay conflicts that may lead to default penalties.

As with the above, the prime prerequisite once the weapon of choice has fulfilled the stated requirements of the user service{s} is to place it into production and out into the field for use. What is not spoken, is final engineering is usually incomplete when placed into use in the real world. This then is accounted for with later modifications and updating by the manufacturier as defects appear that was not in the engineering specificaations.

Karl