Forum: F-35 Lightning II

The following blog link discusses the fallout from the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the Joint Strike Fighter:

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&newspaperUserId=27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7&plckPostId=Blog%3a27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post%3a8bd0915d-ea2e-49c6-8b75-2f3258e284eb&plckScript=blogScript&plckElementId=blogDest

Even conventional versions of the F-35 are rapidly reaching the $110 million dollar per aircraft mark and that's based on LM selling MORE than the original 3000+ units! But at those costs few foreign buyers will be interested/able to buy more so unit prices will go even higher! Norway apparently got a fixed price deal of 52 million per aircraft, I wonder who's going to be paying for the difference?

Discuss...

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It is past time for Congress to really start putting pressure on Gates/Obama to reverse their previous decision to kill the F-22 and shift all focus to the F-35. The F-35 program is facing serious trouble. We can't allow the F-22 production line to close while so much uncertainty surrounds the F-35 program. The F-22 MUST remain in production, so that we at least have some options should the F-35 program totally self destruct. The new figures suggesting a $110 million price tag for the F-35, even if bought in numbers totaling 3,000 is just, well, mind blowing. There is no way the Air Force gets 1,763 of them at those kind of prices. Nor will the Navy or Marine Corps. And I suspect the foreign partners will reduce their orders even more substantially. That will only further drive costs through the roof. Thus, when all is said and done, the F-35 will likely cost about as much as what we would be paying for additional Raptors if more were ordered right now. That isn't going to sit very well with Congress, especially considering Gates sold them on the F-35 being the more affordable aircraft of the two.

No, a new fighter has been put off to long already; the prime reason we're in this mess to begin with. (Kinda like tankers and new bombers...)

To purchase 'new' F-15s or F-16s with comparable 5th generation engines, avionics, radar, 'stealth treatments' will likely approach $100M for an Eagle or $85M for a Viper and that's without changing anything major that would require extra flight testing. Why wouldn't you pay the extra for the more advanced aircraft with full stealth?

Fighter aircraft aren't going to get cheaper. Everything gets more expensive with inflation. Especially with high-tech equipment like military aircraft, the more technology you put into them, the more expensive they get in addition to inflation.

Even if you tried to produce F-4 Phantoms today, with the original equipment from 1965, they would be well into the $20 million range, hardly the outrageous $2.4 million they cost back then. (Yes people scoffed at that figure back then...) F-15s were SO expensive in the early 1970s we got the 'cheap' F-16s to help keep our numbers up, they cost more than the original Eagles by the time Viper production ended.

Point is, everything gets more expensive over time. When I was a teen we could use $5 worth of gasoline in a $200 used-car and drive all weekend. Try to buy a $200 used car today, and see how far that 1.3 gallons of gas takes you!

There is an old mechanic saying that applies to equipment just as it does to any sort of maintenance, "Pay me now, or pay me later" For those of you who haven't figured this out by now, if you 'pay me later' you'll be paying more. You'd have thought that Congress learned it's lesson with the B-2, but then they ruined the Raptor; lets hope they don't completely screw up the Lightening II program and leave us with Vipers the age of B-52s!?!

Keep the F-35 going; or the 'next' aircraft will be even more. (Kinda like if they'd kept the Raptor line open to 380 aircraft they would have been cheaper than Lightening IIs at this rate!)

Keep 'em flyin' Thumb

TEG

If by the 'dream being dead' you mean the dream of an affordable strike fighter then yes it's dead. The program however lives on. The question is really where do we go from here?

If all new fighters have to cost around $100+ million, as suggested above, then how is a brand new F/A-18E/F's in multi year buys costing $50 million? Do we have any realistic estimate on what, for example, 1,763 new F-16X's would really cost? How about just 300? Moreover, all the up front costs had been already paid and follow on F-22's were going to cost $140 million and decline as more were purchased- how much for 1,763?

One central design consideration for the JSF was affordability- both to purchase and to operate. This dream has indeed died. Dr Carter was quite clear by stating "affordability no longer a core pillar" of the program; moreover, he stated more than once that affordability must be restored to the program. He is quite right. The next bombshell in this program could very well be the promised projections on operational cost promised by Director Fox (DOD CAPE).

When an F-35C turns out to cost $150+ million and new F/A-18E/F's cost $50 million and is much cheaper to operate (I don't even want to cite the USN estimates as the disparity is obscene and I'd prefer to wait for CAPE's numbers) it's simply not going to get through the US Congress and many in the NAVAIR will support the cheaper alternative.

Many observe the program is too big too fail. The program has however actually failed a major design criteria in being affordable. The program in this regard is a failure. It has almost doubled in price prior to almost the entire flight test program being flown and thus it is certain to further rise in price and be subject to further delays.

What should be done is the program is radically slowed down, even frozen, till SDD is complete. We've mostly paid the $50 billion for SDD already so let it run. Then when we know how much the aircraft actually costs we decide if we want to buy it. Assuming the answer is no then ask LM for a new design and call it the best strike fighter you can design for a fixed price contract of $75 million for 1,500 (or something along those lines). Of course we'd open up that contest to anyone else.

The simple fact is we do not require stealthy strike fighters for every role. The only rational thing about paying $100+ million for a stealthy strike fighter to replace the A-10 was that it helped reduce the overall cost of JSF by adding numbers to the program. An A-10 replacement should have greater loiter time, equal or better survivability, and be a bit smaller by eliminating the GAU-8. This aircraft should not cost more than $25 to $30 million.

If the F-35 can not be remade into something we can afford then kill it. The USN and USMC can buy more F/A-18E/F's for $50 million a copy and with the savings fund a future replacement (for $130 to $150+ million the Corp can just learn to live without V/STOL- leaving aside the runway damage issue of the F-35B). The USAF can buy more legacy aircraft if it wants, the F/A-18E/F, a foreign design, or even some more F-22's and perhaps fund a stretched FA-22 and/or an EA-22.

For the future they can either find someone to build an affordable strike fighter or simply do away with the whole low from the high/low mix of aircraft we created in the 1970's. Frankly if you need an air superiority fighter then buy one. If we need an attack aircraft like the A-10 then buy one of those. If you need an affordable bomb truck then build one and call it a medium bomber or an attack bomber. There is certainly a need for some number of dual role fighter class aircraft but we are not going to be able to afford to replace all of tactical aviation in the USAF with this aircraft. The numbers are not in the budget for the USAF to buy 80+ F-35's a year at $110+ million.

The next aircraft need not cost more. This program has been very poorly managed according to everyone now responsible for oversight. Exactly how does it make any sense that the 188th F-22 was going to cost $140 million but we need to produce 3,000+ F-35's to keep the cost "down" to only double original projections? If 3,000 gets us an aircraft for $110+ million what is the unit cost for 2,813 more F-22's and how much is the F-35 for 2,500 or 2,000?

It really doesn't matter how good the F-35 turns out to be because it's entirely relevant to cost. It might be a wonderful for $80 million and an absolute disaster at $150+ million.

In any case it's all a tad premature. We do not know what an F-35 will cost. All we have is a current estimate based on a whole lot of assumptions about an aircraft that has barely even begun it's flight test program. If it turns out we can buy F-35A's for an average cost of say $95 million then we will probably buy quite a few. At $125 million we'll buy somewhat less. At $150+ million for an F-35A I respectfully suggest this program is over. This program is not too big to die and there are alternatives.

Personally I wish we had never gotten to this point and that the F-35 actually was an affordable aircraft we could buy in large numbers. That dream however is, as the question poses, rather dead.

Good arguments TEG as always. I'll only disagree with you on this philosophical point in that modernized F-16 block 50/52++ (w/SABR, e.g.) UPC could be around $110m today, while the block III F-35A's UPC, ordered in 2016 once finally mature could still likely be around $160M +!

So the bottom line issue here is arguably: should USAF wait until FY16-FY17 to finally start it's recapitalization with $160m +/- block III (basic) F-35A, (minus a HUGE fighter gap between now and 2018), or incrementally augment the recapitalization requirements until 2018 with said modernized, more reliable, closer to numerical-requirement-meeting new build $110m F-16s (SABR equipped), w/ lower Life Cycle Costs et al, as part of the 'low' mix?

It's a highly relevant, deeply impacting, philosophical debate, imo. Regards..

Quote:

It's a highly relevant, deeply impacting, philosophical debate, imo. Regards..

geogen,

You are absolutely right sir! There are so many ways to approach the JSF program it's almost sickening. LOL!

All the information I see is nothing but ".com" websites. American news media leans so far to the left, I have zero confidence in its ability to report the truth. Maybe I haven't paid much attention to the JSF side of this forum, but is there actual significant ".gov" information on this program? I understand inflation and the fact that the JSF has capabilities never before seen will jack up the price. But my country's national security is at risk right now because of the huge amount of money it owes. The US govt has a horrible habit of spending money it doesn't have whether it's under a Republican administration or a Democrat one. If we really don't have the money for this program it needs to be shelved or postponed until we have "actual" room in the budget. I'm not jumping to conclusions or being an alarmist, but if the JSF program costs are spiraling out of control it will ultimately do very little to protect America and it's allies. On the flip side, I'm certain the same stuff said about the F-35 has been said about past programs like the F-15, F-16, F-14, etc. But this day in age we have the internet which allows the voices of concern and criticism to be louder, travel further, and faster than during previous generations. We didn't have the internet while the teen series fighters were being developed, so there isn't much to remember about their growing pains. The F-35 is probably just another typical large scale defense program, behind schedule and over budget.

Disco - Don't worry about the media. Look at the article linked on top and others on the site and you will find abundant linky goodness to the sworn DoD testimony before the SASC.

TEG - What will the F-35 cost by the time the increased cost has led to a reduced production rate, further increasing costs and so on? Around $80 m, today's money, is probably the top end for a Super F-16. Is it really a 2-to-1 capability difference?

Well that cost figure is staggering, but I'd like to know what it means. Is it the price for a SDD, LRIP, or FRP bird? And Im not sure how Carter came up with that number when LM is just kicking off the new EAC analysis. A good guess? Extrapolation? I think politics are at play here.

This year will be interesting. It will be an epic PR battle between cost news stories and first-flight/first-something news stories. And of course the spin on both sides.

underhill wrote:

Disco - Don't worry about the media. Look at the article linked on top and others on the site and you will find abundant linky goodness to the sworn DoD testimony before the SASC.

TEG - What will the F-35 cost by the time the increased cost has led to a reduced production rate, further increasing costs and so on? Around $80 m, today's money, is probably the top end for a Super F-16. Is it really a 2-to-1 capability difference?

Its left to be proven but I think the F-35 will fundamentally change air attack warfare. A SH will not do that. 2-1? Heck who knows. Maybe we should pull up the software block charts and see the differences in capability.

underhill wrote:

TEG - What will the F-35 cost by the time the increased cost has led to a reduced production rate, further increasing costs and so on? Around $80 m, today's money, is probably the top end for a Super F-16. Is it really a 2-to-1 capability difference?

The fundamental problem is this; purchasing a limited number of 'new' F-16s would cost almost the same.

Inflation is the biggest threat to fighter programs, new or old.

If you put half the capabilities of the F-35 into the F-16 and tried to push it to market you'd likely approach $100 or more. When the price gets high, the numbers drop; as the numbers drop the price gets higher, which causes numbers to drop more. While everyone bickers, fights, and debates, years pass by and inflation takes hold; capabilities are added causing further delay and higher costs... All of this snowballs and the program can collapse under it's own budget weight.

Look at the B-1, B-2, and F-22. All had their issues and numbers were limited; and makes the situation look much worse than it truly is.

The F-22's price was starting to drop nicely just as they decided to kill the program less than 200 jets in. Looking at the projected expense of the F-35, the Raptors may have proved a quicker/cheaper way to fill the fighter gap as our F-15s and F-16s are retired.

Shrug

TEG

Quote:

The F-22's price was starting to drop nicely just as they decided to kill the program less than 200 jets in. Looking at the projected expense of the F-35, the Raptors may have proved a quicker/cheaper way to fill the fighter gap as our F-15s and F-16s are retired.

This is what I said, and what many of the F-22's supporters said, before the Administration killed the program. No one listened. Funny thing was, there was this pervasive sense back then that most of the F-35 problems had already been solved and the only thing keeping the program from reaching maturity (and full production) was the money being spent on the Raptor. In a sense this has proven to be true: you can pay for one but not the other, as they both cost over $100 million. So the question now becomes, which fighter is most cost effective? Which gives you the most lethality and survivability for the money? This is assuming, of course, that the F-35's full abilities are already known and tested, so they can be compared with the F-22's - something which obviously isn't the case.

In short, shutting down Raptor production was a big mistake. All we can hope is that is doesn't cost us - I'm actually optimistic on that front.

Okay, assuming the F-35 cancellation is inevitable, what are the alternatives?

1) Buy new-build Legacy fighters.

2) Build more F-22's.

3) Start over with a new design.

4) Do the UAS thing...

Let me think about that:

1) Buy new-build Legacy fighters.
This would work from a maintenance and operation cost perspective, though as TEG stated, stuffing all the F-35 capability into an F-16 would give you something that costs almost as much as a whole F-35. But purchase cost isn't as big a deal as people think (you will always pay more for operating an aircraft in the end than what you bought it for), and the biggest problem is capability.
The teen series is simply not as capable, there are real airframe limitations to what you can do- you can tack on internal bays as on the F-15 Silent Eagle, but it's never going to be as efficient as an aircraft that was designed that way, for example. You cannot make an F-16 as stealthy as an F-35 without essentially making a new aircraft, which would defeat the cost argument. You can either have them cheap, or you can make survivable.

Note: Purchasing legacy aircraft as a gap filler until anything from 2)-4) is accomplished has it's own problems. You're going to end up with a small number of obsolete airframes (lost economies of scale) by the end of their service career, unless you foreshorten it (which would also be a waste). You can either be the Italians with an F-104 into the 2000's, or get new airplanes that you're only going to operate for a few years before boneyarding them.

2) Build more F-22's.
This would be pretty sweet from a capability standpoint for the most part, but this would be prohibitively expensive unless you decided that a vastly smaller manned air force was acceptable. Deciding to build more right now would get you F-22's that cost substantially more than ones coming off the line currently (they've already stopped purchasing long-lead items, IIRC). They also don't have a lot of the F-35's more specialized equipment. No DAS, EOTS, etc. Installing them would only drive up the cost more, and you still couldn't carry 2000lb. munitions.
Ahhh, but the FB-22 could! But wait, you have to account for the fact that making any substantial changes to the airframe would mean you must have a totally new flight test program, and redesign large parts of the production line, which would add on significant cost, similar to that of a totally new aircraft. That's not even accounting for the difficulty of making the design pan out in the first place. Aerodynamics and RCS would be hindered by sticking with stuff designed in the early 90's, when DooM was still cutting edge graphically.

3) Start over with a new design.
Let Boeing have a crack at it, they've got a good thing going with the SHornet, maybe they could do a better job. Eventually, you'd end up with something probably better than the F-35... eventually. You can't guarantee that it wouldn't suffer hiccups or problems, or even adhere to the initial requirements. Plus it's not like starting from scratch is going to save you money, since you're going to have to do everything over again. Design, flight test, probably another damn flyoff...
And the timeline! oh God, the timeline!

4) Do the UAS thing...
They just aren't advanced enough, and won't be for quite a while. Autonomous strike missions, they could maybe do if you had really good intelligence as to targets and air defense gaps, but be prepared to lose a whole lot due to lack of flexibility. You could remote control them, but to get a reasonably-sized force together at one would require huuuuuge amounts of bandwidth, which would mean more satellites, which would mean more money (and really easy targets for any high-end adversary). You could try to control them with a human mission commander in an aircraft up front, but what do you give him to fly?
Plus, you know, the whole development and flight test thing all over again. Can't forget that.

Any combination of the above is simply going to sum the disadvantages.

So basically, when looking at the downsides of building the F-35:
Damned if you do < Damned if you don't

Forum Veteran Joined: Apr 16, 2005 - 03:16 PM Posts: 800

Maybe the SH could make a good CAS aircraft thanks to its large wings and 6 wing hardpoints. A new GAU-22 could be developed for the centerline station. The fact that it has 2 engines would increase its survivability too.

So maybe it would be a good idea to get about 150 SHs in the short term, before the block 3 F-35 is available. In ~2025 the SHs would start replacing the A-10s.. An AF variant may even be a bit cheaper to build.

I don't like the idea of F-15SEs or F-16s, the F-15SE is too expensive and the F-16 not capable enough.

Last edited by jeffb on Mar 14, 2010 - 03:41 AM; edited 1 time in total

Maybe it'll be easier to fix the program than we think. What if you drop the F-35B from the program right now? Tell the marines sorry, you'll have to use either the CTOL or CV variants. The increased buy of the simpler variants, assuming that the Marines go for it, combined with the reduced development costs might bring the simpler versions in at less than the $110 million mark. Anyone with a better idea than me like to run the numbers?

*** Oops, except that the UK Government is expecting a whole bunch of them. Oh well, guess we are screwed Very Happy

***

Prinz_Eugn wrote:

Okay, assuming the F-35 cancellation is inevitable, what are the alternatives?

It's not 'inevitable'.

I'd hope the Pentagon will reinforce the fact that the F-35, at this point, is VITAL to national security.

Whatever they put off today, will cost everyone more tomorrow.

Two Cents

TEG

Forum: F-35 Lightning II

Is the F-35 dream over?