Block 3F Status / Schedule

[SpudmanWP]

No, there are no plans to leave the jets as-is. Specific plans as to an upgrade timeline have not been released.

“The JPO is unaware of any option currently under consideration by the Services that would keep 2B or 3i configured jets as a final end state. We did provide data to the Services for this potential; however, the JPO analysis shows the best path forward is to modify fielded jets to the 3F configuration.”

http://www.pogo.org/straus/issues/weapo ... eport.html


As see in the thread earlier, there are several groups within the 108 where some can be fixed cheaply & quickly and others are not.

26 require SW only upgrades (3 days/aircraft)
19 require all of the above and new signal processor cards (+ 0 days/aircraft)
18 require all of the above and the newer HMDS (+15 days/aircraft)
45 require all of the above and TR2 (+30 days/aircraft)

[citanon]

And the hand wringing has mainly occurred on websites that generate extra web traffic by wringing their hands.

[quicksilver]

Everyone should remember to be cautious about what one chooses to believe about stuff written in the public domain, particularly when its POGO doing the writing.

Folks I know say LRIP2-5 upgrade to 3F are already funded and (I think...) contracted. Dunno when they begin the work but likely icw some of the concurrency mods.

[steve2267]

There was a lot of hand wringing about the orphan F-35s. So are they are or they not going to modify these jets? It would seem the upgrade would mainly be limited to a software update and some hardware upgrades. But does anyone know if it will be cost prohibitive to upgrade these jets vs buying new ones?

Question: if 2B jets are more than sufficient to conduct all necessary training of new Lighting pilots, does it make financial sense to upgrade training jets to 3F?

Key question is whether they can upgrade them at reasonable costs to a better than 4th gen fighter condition. Look at the USAF when they began procuring the F-16. The C model had more capability than the A model, yet there was value in keeping the A model in the fleet.

Are you truly implying that some F-35's are not as good as 4th gen fighters? F-35's in the 3i condition are able to go to war. If memory serves, the USMC went IOC with 2B jets, so 2B should be able to launch AMRAAMs and drop dumb bombs, if not JDAMS. IMO, any F-35 is far far better than any 4th gen fighter. It's baked into its skin and design.

[alloycowboy]

Lockheed Martin delays F-35 Block 3F software final certification to February

http://www.janes.com/article/75800/lock ... o-february

[doge]

http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArch ... ttern.aspx

F-35: Exiting the Pattern
JANUARY 2018
JOHN A. TIRPAK
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
At long last, the F-35 strike fighter is set to complete development.
The F-35 Lightning II’s development program is finally coming to a close, nearly 17 years after the Lockheed Martin design was selected as the Joint Strike Fighter, and almost six years after the program was restructured due to delays and cost growth. Aircraft in the baseline, or “3F” configuration, will be handed over to the Operational Test community in the next few months to verify that everything works as intended.

Under the restructure plan, initial operational test and evaluation (IOT&E) was supposed to have begun around July 2017, which means the development program will probably wrap up between six and eight months late. That reflects estimates made by top Pentagon leaders—such as former Undersecretary of Defense Frank Kendall—in mid-2016, but is better than estimates made by the Defense operational test and evaluation community that same year. DOT&E forecast that operational testing might be delayed until late 2018 or even early 2019.

There is “nothing major,” preventing the F-35 from entering the home stretch of its basic development, Joint Program Office director Vice Adm. Mathias Winter told Air Force Magazine in a September interview.

“We have the resources” in the Fiscal 2017 and 2018 defense budgets to complete development, Winter said, adding that he expected airworthiness flight testing of all three variants, in the 3F configuration, to conclude in December 2017. Development will have cost $55 billion, in then-year dollars, by the time it is done.
F-35 Joint Program Office officials say if new discoveries require an extension of System Development and Demonstration (the official name of the development effort), $100 million has been earmarked by Congress to come out of the first batch of money for future upgrades to cover the shortfall.

Flight testing of the Air Force version, the F-35A, was already complete last summer, while flight testing of the F-35B—the short takeoff, vertical landing variant used by the Marine Corps—was in September only a few “ski jump” test flights from completion, he said. Testing the F-35C carrier-compatible version was several “high-altitude, high-mach” test flights from concluding, but those flights are heavily dependent on good weather, Winter said.

Conditions at both Edwards AFB, Calif., and NAS Patuxent River, Md., deteriorate in the winter, making weather “probably our biggest inhibitor” of completing the flight sciences phase of development, he said.

While IOT&E depends on handing testers 23 jets in the 3F configuration, Winter’s predecessor, retired Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, told Congress last year an arrangement was being struck with DOT&E to begin testing with fewer jets, adding more as they become available. Earlier-version F-35s, flying with the 2B or 3i software and/or processors, have to be modified to the latest and “final baseline” configuration. The 23 jets comprise six each of the A,B, and C variants from the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy, while three more will be B models from Britain and two others will be Dutch F-35A models.

So what happens after the jets are handed off? The test community will put them through their paces, matching them against the no-fail requirements set by the services in all the mission areas the F-35 must perform. These include air-to-ground attack, air-to-air combat, suppression of enemy air defenses, electronic warfare, electronic attack, close air support, and ancillary missions related to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. If all goes well, and no substantive deficiencies are found, the F-35 can proceed to full-rate production in the 3F configuration.

Planning is well underway for follow-on development. Driven by changes in the threat, the new effort—at this point known broadly as Block 4—will continuously add new weapons, software, electronic warfare capabilities, sensors, and maintenance updates. The Government Accountability Office, however, recommended in April that the Pentagon hold off on Block 4, against the possibility that something serious may yet be discovered in testing. That in turn would delay ramping up to full production rates and the fielding of the Navy’s F-35C, the GAO said. The program office, responding to the GAO, rejected that suggestion, saying the evolving threat demands that Block 4 work begin without “undue delay” to ensure there are no US or partner nation “critical … capability gaps.”

It is worth noting that the Marine Corps went operational with its initial F-35Bs in 2015 and the Air Force with F-35As in 2016, but with a less-than-all-up operating system and weapons suite. The Navy is due to declare initial operational capability in 2018, with the 3F version of software and weapons suite.

The Air Force and Marine Corps units flying the F-35 have given it rave reviews, and both services have deployed their F-35s operationally. The major gripes reported by operational squadrons so far have mainly to do with spare parts availability. The joint program office has acknowledged that issue, saying vendors are making parts for several block configurations of the F-35 at the same time.

As the majority of jets are upgraded to the 3F baseline, fewer versions of parts will be needed, more of the baseline types can be made, and the issue should be mitigated, the JPO has said.

Weapons accuracy—often a sticking point in test schedules—was completed in October. Thanks to greater availability of tankers for flight test support, the basic weapons suite was down to only one box to check off: the Joint Standoff Weapon, a stealthy glide bomb. Nothing had been removed from the weapon testing program except a cluster bomb that was subject to an international treaty.

What will be handed over to the Pentagon’s initial operational test and evaluation community will be a “warfighting capability,” Winter said. The aircraft will be in the 3F configuration, flying with 3F software version 6.3. Developmental test units have already been flying with version 6.2, Winter said, “so they have awareness, understanding” of what’s in it. Also required are fully stocked mission data files (MDF) which populate the F-35’s computers with up-to-date information on threats around the world, and the facility that develops those files will also be scrutinized by OT&E.

Simulators are also part of the IOT&E evaluation, to ensure that they accurately replicate the aircraft’s performance as it has been verified in flight test.

Finally, the operational testers will scrutinize the latest version of the Autonomic Logistics Information System, or ALIS, that tracks aircraft by tail number, schedules the changeout of consumable parts, and actually communicates with the aircraft’s computers—such that the jet can tell the maintenance system of problems developing or faults that occurred on a mission. That way, maintainers know what to fix the moment the fighter comes to a full stop on the ramp. ALIS version 3.0 was to be available for operational test in December, Winter said.

To save time and keep on schedule, “we want to use the simulator to reduce the amount of test points we have to fly” and get IOT&E underway as soon as possible, Winter said, adding that the idea is that if the airplane’s performance matches certain data points in the flight envelope, it’s not necessary to fly all the data points in between.

Reminded that this approach was one of the ways the F-35 program got into trouble in the mid-2000s, Winter said he couldn’t comment on program decisions “back before my time,” but said IOT&E “is still making a decision and looking at the validity” of the shortcut.

Winters said his conversations with the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, David H. Duma, tell him that the organization “has taken a more reasonable approach” to clearing the 3F than that of predecessors. Although “they’re … sticklers and they’re pushing,” the DOT&E looks “at the value of where we are, and the maturity of where we are, and so we have a very good working relationship with IOT&E now.”

The IOT&E program should last “roughly a year,” Winter said, and the exact test plan was to have been nailed down in November.

Under Bogdan, the Block 4 program was notionally slated to deliver capability upgrades in increments of two years each: hardware and weapons alternating with software. Winter said, “That’s unexecutable.”

“There’s too much scope in each of these. Can’t do it,” Winter said. He explained that the F-35 must progress along a number of fronts at once, and because they all work together—operational flight program, mission data files, ALIS, new weapons, new processors, etc.—increments can’t really be looked at in pieces.
He said he would bring an updated Block 4 schedule to his boss—Air Force acting acquisition chief Darlene Costello—at “the end of October.”
_______________________________________
Will the updates come at intervals longer than two years?

“We will meet the warfighter requirements for the capability … based on the threat,” Winter asserted. The JPO is studying the “technical flowdown to determine the most effective and efficient cadence of delivery” of each element of Block 4. Assuming Costello approval, he expected to take this updated plan to the Defense Acquisition Board for its blessing in November.

Winter noted that although the Air Force has backed off its plan to build 80 F-35s per year for at least the next five years, that doesn’t reflect anything going on in development.

Changes to quantities—the Air Force stopping at 60 per year, while the Marine Corps is accelerating from 46 to 60 across the future years defense plan—is “budget driven, not capacity or warfighter requirement driven.” The services certified to Congress last summer that they are sticking to their planned purchase numbers: 1,763 F-35As for the Air Force, 353 F-35Bs for the Marine Corps, and “340 [C models] split between the Navy and Marine Corps,” Winter noted. “We’re committed to the program of record,” he insisted, adding that the program is on the verge of a large surge in production.

“We’ll go from 60 airplanes to 160 airplanes [per year] over these next five years,” he said, adding “expanding and stretching the supplier base, we will go from 240 airplanes in the field today to almost 1,000 aircraft in the field in five years ... while bringing the rapid capability enhancements of Block 4.”

[SpudmanWP]

The only thing to add is that there still seems to be some, even high up, that do not understand the modularity of the F-35. There is no reason to stretch the 2-year Block schedule as each block has it's own team and is working on different features that do not necessarily depend on work on a previous Block being complete before they can start. The F-35's extensive use of Middleware and VMs allow for this.

Look at this older Block plan and you can get an idea of how they interact in their scheduling. Hopefully the FY2019 (due out in Feb2018) will shed more light on the FOM schedule.

[blindpilot]

Great Link...

:salute:
http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArch ... ttern.aspx

F-35: Exiting the Pattern
JANUARY 2018
JOHN A. TIRPAK
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
At long last, ... is better than estimates made by the Defense operational test and evaluation community that same year. DOT&E forecast that operational testing might be delayed until late 2018 or even early 2019. .....

Winters said his conversations with the Pentagon’s Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, David H. Duma, tell him that the organization “has taken a more reasonable approach” to clearing the 3F than that of predecessors. Although “they’re … sticklers and they’re pushing,” the DOT&E looks “at the value of where we are, and the maturity of where we are, and so we have a very good working relationship with IOT&E now.” ..

Guess that answers all the Gilmore questions. For the record "GILMORE WAS WRONG" just saying ... for all those "but DOT&E says" folks. The guy was an unqualified self preserving serving jerk ... just MHO of course.

BP

[doge]

http://www.luke.af.mil/News/Article-Dis ... 5-program/

Luke’s newest AMU supports F-35 program
By Airman 1st Class Caleb Worpel, 56th Fighter Wing Public Affairs / Published December 01, 2017

LUKE AIR FORCE BASE, Ariz. -- Since the arrival of the first F-35A Lightning II to the 63rd Fighter Squadron earlier this year, maintainers, crew chiefs and other respective maintenance positions have been steadily working to continue developing Airmen toward building the future of Airpower.

The 63rd Aircraft Maintenance Unit officially opened their doors on October 1 and have since led to the success of 162 sorties and 228.3 flying hours in support of Luke’s F-35 program.

“The 63rd AMU is contributing to the F-35 program by working out kinks with operations,” said Capt. Cameron Taylor, 63rd AMU officer in charge. “We are getting the aircraft in the air to better the software and ready pilots for the impending arrival of more 3F aircraft.”

The unit is the first Luke F-35 AMU to receive a 3F, or full-up, combat aircraft capable of pulling 9G’s in the air.

“Each unit has a significant job within the F-35 program to train pilots and maintainers,” said Tech. Sgt. Derriel Morris, 63rd AMU noncommissioned officer in charge of debrief. “The 63rd is unique because we are just getting started. Our sorties might be lower than other units right now, but we are going to keep ramping up to match, and eventually surpass them.”

Currently, 146 personnel and seven aircraft are assigned to the 63rd, Taylor said. The AMU is scheduled to grow to approximately 200 personnel and 22 aircraft in the near future.

Through technological advances and continuous analysis, the F-35 program at the 63rd AMU and Luke as a whole continues to directly build the future of Airpower from within the 56th Fighter Wing.

I am looking forward to the 3F9G air show! Exciting...

[SpudmanWP]

The DOT&E has OK'd the plan to start IOT&E before all 23 jets are ready.

Pentagon OKs limited F-35 testing before modifying jets

13 DECEMBER, 2017 SOURCE: FLIGHTGLOBAL.COM BY: LEIGH GIANGRECO WASHINGTON DC
The Pentagon’s top weapons tester intends to approve limited testing on the Lockheed Martin F-35 while the programme office waits for modifications needed to begin the fighter’s full initial operational test and evaluation (IOT&E).

Recent reports stated that the Defense Department’s office of the Director of operational test and evaluation (DOT&E) had approved some IOT&E testing that would include close air support and reconnaissance missions, a major shift from the office’s previous position that warned against testing without completing modifications to all 23 test aircraft.

This week, the US Air Force clarified DOT&E intends to approve select “pre-IOT&E” events such as cold weather or ship suitability testing. DOT&E expects to approve as many pre-IOT&E events as possible without interrupting ongoing modifications on the 23 test aircraft that will allow formal testing to begin, the service says in an email to FlightGlobal.

DOT&E has not approved any plans that would allow the start of F-35 IOT&E before all test aircraft are configured with required modifications, a Pentagon spokesman tells FlightGlobal.

In its 2016 report on the F-35, DOT&E director Michael Gilmore highlighted the “extensive and time-consuming modifications” still required for the test fleet. Due to the ongoing delays, Gilmore projected the fleet would likely not be able to start formal testing until 2019. At the time of the report, Gilmore cited 155 different modifications needed across all variants and lots, though no single aircraft required all 155 fixes.

“In fact, IOT&E could be delayed to as late as (calendar year 2020), depending on the completion of required modifications to the IOT&E aircraft,” the report states.

Beginning formal testing before the 23 aircraft are production ready would mark a stark departure from DOT&E’s previous recommendations, though former Joint Programme Office executive officer Lt Gen Christopher Bogdan had suggested a similar plan advocating piecemeal testing. But with new leadership at the office under the Trump administration, the recent move toward some early testing could signal a policy shift.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon may be aggravating the issue as the department continues to purchase new F-35s even as its existing inventory is not yet combat capable.

“The fact that the programme has not even contracted for all the testing aircraft and has been favoring purchasing new aircraft is telling that they’re not taking the testing process very seriously,” says Dan Grazier, a fellow at the Project on Government Oversight.

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/artic ... -j-444149/

[steve2267]

Spud, sorry, but that article really should go in the basement dweller thread, the reporting is so atrocious.

First, Gilmore is no longer the DOT&E director, yet the story quotes him as the (current) DOT&E director, because it does not qualify him as the former director.

Second, it quotes Gilmore, but does not include any quotes or statements from the current director, nor does it state that any queries were directed to the new director to clarify how things have changed from the former director's direction.

Third, it makes no or very little attempt to look into the reasons behind this new direction -- to get started before all 23 test aircraft have been updated to the latest 3F standard.

And Fourth, lastly, it quotes some dimwit from POGO.

So it quotes the former DOT&E director in such a way as to make it seem he is still the director -- or I should say, that someone reading this story about the F-35 for the first time, would easily make the leap or assumption that Gilmore is still the DOT&E directory. It quotes a POGO nimrod. It does not attempt to explain the reasoning behind this change in direction. This story is misleading at best. Utter disinformation at worst.

[SpudmanWP]

Despite the obvious bias, it's main purpose is to show the new direction. I'll try to find a better source.

---Sorry, Flightglobal is the 1st one out with the story.

Btw, the new DOT&E was just sworn in on Dec 11th, so his plate is a little full now.

Robert F. Behler was sworn in as Director of Operational Test and Evaluation on December 11, 2017.

...

General Behler served 31 years in the United States Air Force, retiring as a Major General in 2003. During his military career, he was the Principal Adviser for Command and Control, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C21SR) to the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force (USAF). International assignments as a general officer included the Deputy Commander for NATO's Joint Headquarters North in Stavanger, Norway. He was the Director of the Senate Liaison Office for the USAF during the 104th congress. Mr. Behler also served as the assistant for strategic systems to the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation. As an experimental test pilot, he flew more than 65 aircraft types. Operationally he flew worldwide reconnaissance missions in the fastest aircraft in the world, the SR-71 Blackbird.

Mr. Behler is a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots and an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

[steve2267]

Understand why you posted -- i.e. the new direction, first story out etc.

Yet the "journalist", and I use the term very loosely here, made no mention of the incoming DOT&E director, and quoted the former director in such a way that any lay person could (would?) easily presume he was still the director. Very poorly written at best, intentionally misleading at worst. With the quote of POGO at the end, I lean towards intentionally misleading, or hurtful towards the F-35 program.

[alloycowboy]

Steve go easy on the reporter she is just trying to create copy while working in the current F-35 information vacuum.

Until Rear Admiral Mathias Winter and Maj. Gen. Robert F. Behler release the transition plan from going from Flight Test to Operation Test every one is sort of guessing.

[rheonomic]

The terrible reporting on defense projects makes me almost wish everything from now on is just done classified like B-21.