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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."
Slashdot reader schwit1 writes, "This is akin to buying an exotic car you can barely afford, without also budgeting for insurance, repairs, and tuneups."
Actually it's like buying a new exotic car every three months so you don't have to do schedule maintenance on any of the others.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I couldn't possibly relate to paying for uber expensive fighter jets that I couldn't budget repairs for..
Thanks for the far more relatable scenario of buying exotic cars I can't budget repairs for...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Most of the money is being funneled into the Stargate program to build more F-304s.
"To face death, that's nothing much. But to feel really stupid when you die, well, that would be insufferable."
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 total plane contract is signed. They are going to be built. Bringing the cost of each plane down is dependent on production increasing. You want to slow that down and increase line costs so you can spend money on upgrades for planes that could be replaced by new planes coming off the production line? Look, I'm not saying the program isn't a mess at every level of the contractor. As a subcontractor for not only this but just about every major defense/NASA contractor I see it every day and its infuriating. But this is just a FUD hit piece.
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 same nation that built the SR-71, the A-10 and the F-15 serves up this lemon and tries to pretend it can still build great military aircraft?
The swamp that needs cleaning is the unholy triumvirate of US weapons manufacturers, government procurers and military brass, all sucking on the US taxpayer like a bunch of bloated leeches.
The rest of the country is going to hell while these parasites get fat providing garbage like this trailer queen. When I heard an F-35 completed a trans-Atlantic flight, I had to ask if they'd cut it up and sent it as luggage.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
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.
Oh America, a land where the government thinks a trillion dollars for a fighter jet it can't use much of the time is a good investment, but universal health care like the rest of the developed world has would be considered a waste of money.
Honestly, the AF should get it over with and give the A10s to the fucking Marines, who actually know and could use a badass CAS airframe that's cheap, reliable, and deadly.
See also: C-130s. Best workhorse cargo plane for the kind of missions the Marines need to support (short takeoff, heavy load, etc).
I would also put in a recommendation for the kind of missions we fly against ISIS and the like a return to high loiter time support aircraft like Broncos, etc. ISIS knows jets can only fly around for 20-30 minutes before they have to heat to the base and then they can resume their asshole activities. It changes when you can put bullets in the sky for 4-5 hours, cheaply, and with multiples/shift changes...
At what point would it be cheaper to start being nice to all the other nations, so you don't need to spend more on defence than every other country combined?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
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 really funny part is how far the reality is from what the fanbois on the internet keep repeating to each other; the A-10 is primarily used as a missile platform. It does still do a little bit of close air support, duties it shares with the F-16, but it does it from high altitude as a generic missile launch platform.
People like to repeat that they're really reliable, and it is true they can survive a lot of AAA damage, but the threat in modern combat isn't AAA it is RPGs and MANPADs. And the A-10 is a sitting duck for those. Sure, the pilot is protected by armor, but the engines aren't; they're very vulnerable. They can't loiter at low altitude over infantry to do the type of close air support that the fanbois are picturing! They get shot down doing that. So yeah, they're still stuck using them, but they don't use them differently from the way they use an F-16 for that; flying in circles high overhead, dropping shit on coordinates.
Why do they need new wings? Because the enemy weapons can reach it more easily.
Actually the main reason why everyone on the ground wants A-10s as support, is because they are slow enough to be able to get a good picture of what's going on on the ground. That enables pilots to provide air support even when belligerents are very close to friendlies. In this regard, it doesn't matter what weapons this aircraft carries. It can operate low enough and slow enough when needed, and that is what matters. In this role, it has no real fixed wing competitors other than AC-130. And that aircraft is actually severely vulnerable to ground fire, unlike A-10.
The rest of your points are exactly what you accuse "fanboys" of. Opinionated ignorance. A-10 like all low and slow aircraft is indeed threatened by shoulder launched guided missiles. It's also extremely resilient against such threats and more than capable to take multiple hits without suffering fatal damage, which is why it can and does operate as it does - low and slow. Its gun is an excellent tool to engage soft targets like technicals and supply trucks, conserving heavier missiles and bombs for hardened targets. It provides a unique niche just like Su-25 does. It's a faster and more resilient platform than an attack helicopter with greater payload and ability to loiter, mixed with greater survivability due to design than a gunship like AC-130. Yet it can and does operate "low and slow" when needed, able to accurately view the battlefield from close by and still have time to provide accurate fire support based on this information and not already have passed the target area like other fixed wing attack platforms.
And wings? They go because of metal fatigue as well as ground fire. The fact that they can easily take the ground fire and continue to operate needing just wing replacements every once in a while shows you just how well this particular platform is designed for its role.