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America's F-35s Can't Fly 22% of the Time, Repair Facilities Six Years Behind Schedule (indiatimes.com)
"[N]early 200 F-35s might permanently remain unready for combat because the Pentagon would rather buy new aircraft than upgrade the ones the American people have already paid for," according to one defense news site. And now Bloomberg reports:
The Pentagon is accelerating production of Lockheed Martin Corp.'s F-35 jet even though the planes already delivered are facing "significantly longer repair times" than planned because maintenance facilities are six years behind schedule, according to a draft audit. The time to repair a part has averaged 172 days -- "twice the program's objective" -- the Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog agency, found. The shortages are "degrading readiness" because the fighter jets "were unable to fly about 22 percent of the time" from January through August for lack of needed parts.
The Pentagon has said soaring costs to develop and produce the F-35, the costliest U.S. weapons system, have been brought under control, with the price tag now projected at $406.5 billion. But the GAO report raises new doubts about the official estimate that maintaining and operating them will cost an additional $1.12 trillion over their 60-year lifetime.
Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "This is akin to buying an exotic car you can barely afford, without also budgeting for insurance, repairs, and tuneups."
The Pentagon has said soaring costs to develop and produce the F-35, the costliest U.S. weapons system, have been brought under control, with the price tag now projected at $406.5 billion. But the GAO report raises new doubts about the official estimate that maintaining and operating them will cost an additional $1.12 trillion over their 60-year lifetime.
Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "This is akin to buying an exotic car you can barely afford, without also budgeting for insurance, repairs, and tuneups."
IIRC the tooling to build new parts went "missing" some time ago (probably stolen, I would guess), and would be extremely costly to replace (possibly on the order of developing a new fighter). So not only can they not build F-22's, their ability to repair and maintain the ones they currently have is limited. Worse yet, they cut the budget significantly so they have considerably fewer than they had originally planned.
I have not heard anything to this effect, but it wouldn't surprise me if one of the reasons we're stuck with the F-35 is that the F-22's would be so very hard to replace, and there just aren't that many of them.
Er, "IEEE 1394 and Power ISA v.2.03".
Working in automotive I understand how "vintage" tech makes it into "current" production: Timelines, budgets, work with what is known to work. That said, it is entertaining to read press releases from last decade surrounding what is going into the F35.
The 'high speed data bus' is IEEE 1394b. It's running on Freescale/NXP/Qualcomm PowerPC embedded processors designed off of the PowerPC G4 (in triplicate) built by the GreenHills compiler. I haven't found any info on it but I'd hate to see what version of Matlab/Simulink they're stuck with as well. Likely 6.5 or R13.
The problem with that was it was pitched as a "COTS" system to save cost. None of those products are "commercial off the shelf" solutions anymore. The hayday of the G4 in mass quantities is gone. I wonder how much money Freescale is guaranteed to keep fab lines up and running for a chip designed in the 90s. I also want to know how the NXP acquisition went through.
End of the day the feds would have probably been better off just making their own CPU and fab lines.
The public wonders why we could get stuff done so effectively in the past. I can tell you why: the government didn't have the level of red tape it has today in the name of "accountability." Your "accountability" was "do the damn job effectively or go to the private sector." I have much older relatives who used to be in the federal civil service. They hate what they see it has become today. They hate the red tape that lets people shrug off responsibility for thinking and puts a committee of 10 people in charge of a $2M budget that is a rounding error in the agency's budget.
It is just rampant, out of control legalism at its worst. Laws and regulations choke everything and ensure no one just assumes authority and gets stuff done (because that would Fascist, since wanting the trains to run on time means you are a natural Fascist who doesn't respect dissent and demands submission to arbitrary authority).
The Air Force does not scrap a plane for being expensive, as the F-35 demonstrates. The F-22 was shut down over politics and to fund, and justify, the F-35, as were the A-10 and a few other planes.
Take the A-10 Thunderbolt for instance. Preferred dedicated ground support aircraft of the Army. So to help nudge along the F-35, the AF killed the A-10 so they could claim that they needed a replacement ground support craft, and aha! the F-35 could fill the roll. Pay no attention to the facts that the F-35 is not armored like the A-10, probably couldn't handle the weight if they tried, and carries a pitiful amount of ammunition for its pitiful little gun.
IIRC the tooling to build new parts went "missing" some time ago (probably stolen, I would guess), and would be extremely costly to replace (possibly on the order of developing a new fighter). So not only can they not build F-22's, their ability to repair and maintain the ones they currently have is limited. Worse yet, they cut the budget significantly so they have considerably fewer than they had originally planned.
I have not heard anything to this effect, but it wouldn't surprise me if one of the reasons we're stuck with the F-35 is that the F-22's would be so very hard to replace, and there just aren't that many of them.
He wasn't talking about the F22, he was talking about something like the Rafael or even lower profile Grippen, which have as much lower IR profile and would likely shoot down an F35 and possibly even F22 before they even realised there was contact.
The US Marines are screwed without the F35 too. They have 9 amphibious assault ships, each larger than a WW2 fleet carrier. Each of these ships are supposed to be able to debark highly mobile , self-contained "expeditionary units" of 2200 troops, each of which has a squadron of ground attack aircraft which have to operate from improvised air strips.
The thing is, the air component of that doesn't work against modern, mobile air defenses, like those possessed by Iraq unless you have a stealth aircraft that can take off and land vertically or nearly so. This will leave the Marine units tied to air support from carriers.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Let's be honest here. Nobody needs the F35 as a military plane. The F35 is a pork barrel project. We could just have pumped the relevant tax moneys into the states involved without anything in return and it would be just as fine. But harder to justify.
Look at the F35. Then look at the current military requirements, the theaters the US military is fighting in, the enemies it is fighting, the equipment of the US troops and that of their enemies, the theaters of war they're deployed to and the (stated and real) military goals they pursue. Then tell me with a straight face that this plane makes in ANY way sense.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How a number is constructed is more important than how good they sound.
So 78% of F35s were able to *fly*. Doesn't mean they're ready to actually *do* anything other than fly, like use their weapons systems, or appear as small on enemy radars as they're supposed to. So that 78% may include aircraft that *could* fly, but which would be pointless to fly.
We should take any statitics on a too-big-to-fail project with a large grain of salt, because they can easily be affected by tweaking your success criteria.
Consider: for FY16, the F35 had a 56% availability rate, which for a plane so early in its deployment is quite impressively good. But because of the program's unique concurrency strategy, in which deliveries of aircraft started years before the design was finalized, 187 of the aircraft will never be capable of combat operations -- not unless they're sent back to the factory and re-manufactured.
As of March of this year, 231 F35s have been delivered, so if "available" meant "capable of flying a combat mission", the highest the FY '16 availability figure could possibly have been is 19% 81% of the fleet were semi-functioning prototypes.
So clearly "available" means "capable of flying the mission you planned for them"; and you can adjust the rate of availability by planning your missions accordingly. Gun not working? Plan a mission with no shooting and the plane is still available.
Without repair capabilities, availability for actual combat is probably zero; but it's probably zero anyway until the software improves.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The F-35 is not a good fighter in a dogfight. The F-22 is better than the F-35 at that, and the Gripen C is even better than the F-22; the Gripen E is even better and the F-35s stealth capabilities are no match for modern radar.
The F-35 simply tries to do everything but fails at it. It was obsolete before it was completed. Just buy a license to produce Gripen E from Saab and save your defence budget.
It worked with East Germany. In the 80s, Franz Josef Strauss (a conservative Bavarian politician that makes the average Republican look like a Pinko Commie) negotiated a billion Marks loan to the communist GDR with the (eventually revealed to be correct) expectation that this would make the GDR fully dependent on western money "like an addict to heroin", in his words.
Then all that had to be done is say "nope" when they needed more.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.