Forum: F-35 Lightning II

http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/c ... ce/2036431
Moreover, given the high cost of maintaining aged aircraft, it's cheaper to pay for retrofitting first-off-the-line F-35 than to keep the older planes flying.

Anybody got a better reference for this billion dollar foolish suggestion?

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A lot hinges on this bit of rhetoric:

Quote:

Concerns about retrofitting the first production models as needed modifications are identified during fielding. They're overblown. Industry experts say the Pentagon has probably overestimated these "concurrence" costs by 75 percent.

Who's to know what the actual cost is till you a get a firm quote from LM? He is correct though in that the more aircraft that are deferred the higher the unit cost for the reduced buy. Adm. Venlet is making these calls. He's not an avowed enemy of the F-35, so I choose to trust his judgement. He knows more about the situation and the costs than any of us.

..and how many of our current fighters have or had structural 'short falls' built into them, or develop after flying the living daylights out of them?

Not to mention the rapidly aging airframes.

Wish I could divulge how may Viper wing changes are being done. The older they get the more extensive (and expensive) the repairs become.

When was the last time you saw a trucking firm use semi tractors that are 20-30 years old? What about police cars? The longer you use them the steeper the cost/life ratio gets. One must realize that at a certain point you're not 'saving' money keeping them around, but costing more.

TEG

There may be a nugget of wisdom somewhere in that argument. It all depends on how one works the numbers to arrive at a fair comparison.. devil is in the details.

"We must pass the bill to see what's in it..."

That's the mentality we are working with....

When will F-35 critics learn? WE NEED THE F-35 TO SAVE MONEY!

What are the chances these early F-35's end up as Thunderbirds or Blue Angels? Beyond training purposes and testing. Similar to the early F-16/18's.

Quote:

Moreover, given the high cost of maintaining aged aircraft, it's cheaper to pay for retrofitting first-off-the-line F-35 than to keep the older planes flying.

Citation needed

Quote:

Moreover, Obama's Pentagon could help bring down the per-unit cost by making a concerted effort to market the F-35 to allies. Every F-35 sold to allies would reduce the Pentagon's purchase price by $10 million per plane. Already foreign sales will shrink the price of the program to taxpayers by $35 billion.

Citation needed

golden_eagle wrote:

"We must pass the bill to see what's in it..."

That's the mentality we are working with....

That mentality is absolutely ridiculous and possibly illegal.

The equation of balancing the cost of fixing concurrent F-35s vs keeping aging fighter going is a relatively easy one and has several aspects.

Let's imagine there were no concurrent F-35s. In other words, LRIP did not start until SDD had ended.

Aspect One, Cost of fix vs cost of life extension: Currently there is plans for the F-35 to replace 2400+ US fighters. The scehdule of when to replace those fighters is based on when those fighters can no longer fly safely (eg their airframe hours have expired). If the start of LRIP was delayed until 2017, that would mean that all 2400+ US fighters will have to wait an additional 10 years (beyond what is currently planned) before they can be replaced. That means a $10-$15 SLEP/Upgrade program (at least) per plane. That is a total of $36 billion dollars. Now compare that $36 billion over the 150-200 concurrent F-35s and you would have to spend over $180 million each before you spent it all. Obviously you would never spend that much as you could buy more than 2.5 FRP F-35s for that $180 mil.

Aspect Two, SDD timeline and costs. If SDD and LRIP are not concurrent then parts for both SDD and LRIP cost more as they cannot depend on their combined economy of scale to drive prices down.

Aspect Three, SDD delays and unexpected need. As has happened, SDD has shown unexpectedly high rates of usage with certain parts. If the LRIP program had not been concurrent (and available to borrow parts from), the SDD program would have had to halt in order to wait for new parts to be produced. There is also the issue of unexpected increase in flight tests that was offset by the loaning of AF-6/7 to the SDD program. If LRIP was not concurrent, the SDD program would have taken longer due to the inability to increase the SDD assets from the LRIP assets. Any delays would have increased the cost of SLEP programs (as jets have to go beyond the planned 10 year extension) in Aspect One.

Aspect Four, Export sales losses. If LRIP was delayed til 2017 then we would have lost the Japanese, Norway, Dutch, etc contests (or they would have never joined the program to begin with). This would cause an increase in F-35 costs over it's lifetime due to a decrease in annual parts production (negative economy of scale issue). For the sake of this comparison, we can assume a conservative estimate of a lifetime increase of $5 million in overall cost. Add that $18 billion (2400 F-35s x $5 mil) to Aspect One's cost and now you have over $270 million to spend on each concurrent F-35.

All aspects combined come to nearly $300 million per concurrent F-35 in savings. That is HUGE!!

Now comes the issue: Spending money depends on politicians and how they care. Most of them are very short sighted and like to pass the buck. We see this in the US's inability to wake-up to the fact that entitlement spending will bankrupt this country unless something is done, SOON. With the F-35, they see the short-term spending as a bad thing and would rather make themselves look good by cutting military spending now rather than dealing with it in order to keep the LONG-TERM spending down.

Also each F-35 replaces more than one existing fighter, because it is a more capable aircraft.

You can also throw in higher 4th gen losses and asset support costs (IFR, ISR, escort, jamming, etc) vs a comparable F-35 based mission.

hcobb wrote:

Also each F-35 replaces more than one existing fighter, because it is a more capable aircraft.

Super Hornet and F-35C squadrons will have the same amount of aircraft, and the same number of squadrons per embarked air wing.

F-35Cs are not replacing F-18E/F, but F-18C/D (along with AV-8Bs and F-16C/D) .

SpudmanWP wrote:

F-35Cs are not replacing F-18E/F, but F-18C/D (along with AV-8Bs and F-16C/D) .

Yep, nor did I said they would. Two squadrons of F/A-18E/Fs and two squadrons of F-35Cs per deck, as currently envisioned.

Forum: F-35 Lightning II

It's cheaper to rebuild cracked up F-35s than F-1Xs