The F-35 Lightning II will be the largest defense acquisition program in US history, and – with the cancellation of continued F-22 procurement – all the manned fighter eggs rest in that basket. Getting the contract was a huge win for Lockheed Martin at Boeing’s expense, but at least the latter had a significant stake in the general aviation market. It’s also proven a windfall to LockMart’s sub-contractors. Competitors left out in the cold will be on life support as the defense industry continues to both decrease in size and consolidate. They may well be considered the lucky ones as others are forced to pull the plug.
Part of the Weapons System Acquisition Reform bill of 2009 was designed to ensure competition between vendors and their subs in procurement of military systems, as described on Senator Carl Levin’s site summarized here:
The Defense Science Board Task Force on Defense Industrial Structure for Transformation reported in July 2008 that consolidation in the defense industry has substantially reduced innovation in the defense industry and created incentives for major contractors to maximize profitability on established programs rather than seeking to improve performance. The Task Force recommended the adoption of measures – such as competitive prototyping, dual-sourcing, funding of a second source for next generation technology, utilization of open architectures to ensure competition for upgrades, periodic competitions for subsystem upgrades, licensing of additional suppliers, government oversight of make-or-buy decisions — to maximize competition throughout the life of a program, periodic program reviews, and requirement of added competition at the subcontract level. Section 203 would require the Department of Defense to implement this recommendation.
Despite that requirement – and despite $2 billion invested by Congress over the years encouraging powerplant competition for the F-35 – a low-grade war is ongoing between Pratt & Whitney, the prime vendor for the F-35′s F135 engine and a General Electrics/Rolls Royce consortium offering a competitive engine, the F136.
Even back in the Cold War, when defense dollars flowed relatively freely, the US Air Force achieved significant savings by pitting GE and P&W against each other in its F-15 and F-16 programs. But times are tight, and cost growth outside the engine domain over the last several years has sent Pentagon budgeteers looking for “efficiencies”, including necking down to a single source engine for the F-35.
In his mark-up of the 2010 defense acquisition bill, Congressman Neil Abercrombie wrote:
(We) do not believe that it is prudent for up to 80 to 90 percent of the fighter fleet to be dependent on a single engine type, provided by one manufacturer.
Being tied to one engine is too high an operational risk to take. This is what happened to the F-15 and 16 fleets in the ‘70s when those aircraft were dependent on one engine type. This also happened to the AV-8 ’Harrier‘ fleet when it was grounded for 11 months due to engine problems. In the cases of the F-15, F-16, and AV-8, none represented a large fraction of the existing fighter force.
With all services depending on one aircraft and one engine type for the vast majority of its capability, the potential is for the entire F-35 fleet to be grounded, if there is similar problem, as has been experienced in the past.
Abercrombie is from Hawaii, which is notable if only for the fact that his is probably the only state without an industrial dog in the F-35 fight. For his troubles, the congressman has drawn the ire of a non-profit organization, “Citizens Against Government Waste,” a group that has drawn fire in the past, accused of fronting for corporations looking to astroturf their competitors out of the game.
The House continues to support engine competition for the F-35, and in the 2010 the Senate Armed Services Committee again agreed, but DoD has declined for three consecutive years to include funds for the F136 in its request – thus congressional marks like Abercrombie’s to put the money back in and comply with public law. Last month, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut – home to Pratt & Whitney – successfully amended the Senate version of the bill by voice vote to kill 2010 funding for the F136. Getting the money back in during reconciliation will be problematical, especially with the politicians’ interests focused elsewhere.
Development work on the F136 engine is nearing completion even as the F135 – theoretically low-risk since it re-purposes much of the F-22′s F119 engine design – struggles. Apart from the technical and cost risk, killing the F136 has political ramifications as well: Britain is the only other Tier 1 partner in the program, and the Rolls Royce partnership is significant to the that country’s struggling industrial program.
Competition in the defense industry is a great good thing, and while cutting money for a competitive engine design may seem to make short term sense, it may well end up being the kind of false economy that drives hugely higher costs over the system life cycle. The technical and political risks, meanwhile, are recognized instantly.
Considering the profligate sums being expended on half-baked notions hither and yon, the $500 million or so being considered to keep the F136 alive falls into the noise band. Over the next 30 years, it could very well be money well spent.
Going single-source is a Very Bad idea.
Especially since the last military engine P&W did worth a damn was the J57. Since then, they’ve produced the TF30 (the Dog that killed Tomcat crewmembers), the F100 (the reason F-16s are called Lawn Darts), and now the F135 (Lawn Dart 2?)
GE has a much better record – and having two firms compete is a tried-and-true Navy method for getting good hardware with minimal oversight (see the F4F/F2A, F6F/F4U, F8U/F11F, and F8U-3/F4H competitions for examples).
Seems painfully obvious, which leads me to believe they’ll do exactly the wrong thing. There’s a great op-ed piece from the Heritage Foundation on the subject, just noticed it at defense-aerospace.com (an aggregator I frequently visit). regards, b.
And here’s the link to bc’s article.
Pardon me, guv’nor, slight correction in this line:
Despite that requirement – and despite $2 billion invested by Congress over the years encouraging powerplant competition for the F-35 – a low-grade war is ongoing between Pratt & Whitney, the prime vendor for the F-35’s F136 engine and a General Electrics/Rolls Royce consortium offering a competitive engine, the F135.
As you correctly note in the rest of the post, the P&W engine is the F135 (a.k.a F135-PW-100), the alternate F136 is from GE/Rolls-Royce.
Oops. Thanks!
As the F-35 program gets ‘down the road’, or matures, having only one vendor for the engine seems to present a ‘choke-point’ for the program.
What if the single-point-of-supply has “a problem”? If a supplier has a QA problem, a labor action (strike)? Where are we then? If the prime vendor decides to hold your ba**s over the fire, you can just say; “Fine, we’ll buy the power-plants from your competitor and you can just stuff it!”
Yes, we don’t “need it”, but it’s good to have an option, rather than being held at the ‘point of a gun’, don’t you think?
As a disclamer, I have no interest, stock, or options, in the companies involved. I was just trying to think it through, but perhaps with too much whisky. Ymmv.
Cheers!
ChrisP
ChrisP/
Just like “just-in-time manufacturing. Works great in peace-time, but potential disruptions in wartime dictate “inefficient” more costly “just-in-case” warehousing/stockpiling as insurance that is foolishly eschewed as not cost effective in peace-time. Same same single-sourcing–people confusing “efficient” with “effective” and regarding them one and the same. No one is willing to pay the insurance premiums anymore. But like people found out in Katrina, the cost of “saving” $ doing nothing/ minimal out-lay far exceeds the cost of doing the extra something if and when the big bad thing happens.
It’s not that easy. Politics or not, it is not that easy to go dual source. For the Navy that would be a logistics disaster. They can’t store parts on a carrier for two different types of engines.
So to go dual source what you’re going to have is the Navy having one engine and the USAF having the other. The USAF can go dual source, as they have with the Fighter Engine Competition (FEC) over the years. The FEC was born out because of Pratt’s treatment of its customers in the 70s (Piss poor). USAF went FEC and the USN just told them to jump off and went GE.
For those who think sole source is so bad, what do you think the F/A-18 has been doing all these years? That is completely manufactured by GE. The Navy’s solution to FEC, since they could not store two different types of engines and their spares, was instead to make GE hand over their blueprints to Pratt and have Pratt manufacture the same engine. Think about how that went over with both companies. Do you think GE REALLY wanted Pratt to manufacture their engine? Blueprints would be wrong, details left out and when Pratt couldn’t really manufacture it to spec… it went GE only. It’s really what GE wanted. It’s really what the Navy wanted.
And to Mike M. Really? Really? That was the last engine worth a damn, the J57? You think the F100 just pieces of FOD? REALLY? They also propel the F15. You think labeling the F16 a lawn dart is an F100 problem? How about the F119? POS? Ya think? Talked to a USAF F119 maintenance man or a F22 driver lately? I think perhaps… you have not.
Oh… and why would the engine be a choke-point for the program when only Lock-Mart is producing the airframe? What if LM has a strike? What if LM has a QA problem with their suppliers?
All of the concerns over a single engine in my opinion apply just as much if not more to having just a single airframe. And G-d knows what’s going to happen to get F-35C’s off the pointy end when nearly every WRA and LRU is a straight to D-level component. (And I surely hope the stealth surface treatments are better than what the F-22 has, having watched high seas come into the hangar bay when the door under EL-1 was broke in the open position. Salt water completely soaked one of our squadron’s jets and a helo leading to a very lengthy E-rec.)
And now time for tin-foil hat mode. Worked a couple years at a major aerospace/defense contractor before the Navy and was acutely aware and concerned with the industry consolidation and the real, negative impact it was having on innovation. Since most of the innovation in a design comes in during the conceptual phase which represents a very small slice of the overall cost of any system, I wondered what the plausibility was of competing conceptual designs first. You could make progress payments (call it R&D) for every design house that responds with an audited “valid” design to keep a healthy and competitive number of design firms. Once a winning design is picked that corporation could be compensated on a cost plus fixed fee basis for their design (and/or given a royalty on each subsequent produced article or lot) and the conceptual design could be re-bid for detail design and manufacture (which are the driving costs and rising barriers of entry killing competition) to the remaining major airframers (three currently) that have the ability to produce large runs of complicated aircraft. This would be more expensive than just letting our shrinking airframer base duke it out as we do now, but a lot cheaper than trying to build up a larger group of major airframers. In the very early days (i.e. WWI and immediate aftermath) the government picked winning designs and re-bid them for manufacture, frequently giving one company’s design to another for production, but apparently only paid the company that won the manufacturing bid.
Gosh the hesitatyness of leaving a reply. Um, Bou, room on a CVN for spare bits, pieces, engines, kind of encompasses their initial design back when the navy was flying 11 different types of aircraft off the beasts and had room to stow everything from P&W engines to oars to row the CODs and anything in between.
Given all the egos out there on a CVN there’s room to store anything from Mastadons to virgin princesses with plenty of room to spare.
Curtis- Point taken. I should have rephrased… it is not logistically sound in judgement for every CVN to have to carry spares for two different motors as well as all the support equipment that is required. We’re talking two differently outfitted backshops, sparing for each type of motor… ALL for the same aircraft. It’s not like the USAF where they can say, “Hill AFB has this engine with these spares, this SE in their backshop while Tyndall has this engine… etc.” I realize that currently CVNs carry for many different a/c, but those a/c aren’t going away (other than the F-14 having just been retired) and so now the thought is to add another aircraft, but in reality from a maintenance standpoint you are adding TWO. It just doesn’t make sense.
That said, if they’re going dual source, I really think what would happen is the Navy will go GE, because that’s what they know and that is a fantastic relationship, and the USAF will go Pratt another case of what they know and fantastic relationship, and tax payers will be appeased that the a/c went dual source.
Keep in mind as well, my generation of Navy pilots know GE. If you go to my father’s generation of Navy fighter/attack pilots, they know Pratt. Before anyone else carries on about Pratt not making an engine worth a damn, I challenge you to talk to a Vietnam Vet who flew A-4s or A-6′s back in the day when THAT was cutting edge or to a current USAF pilot that flies F-22′s or even C-17s for that matter. The TF-30 was never designed to go into the F-14. It was like putting a VW engine in a Porche. It was not a good fit. Terrible, actually.
And I’m not sure if this dual engine issue is the issue we should all be concerned with. My concern as a taxpayer is… can we really have an a/c that suits both the Navy’s and the USAF’s needs? The last time this was tried was on the F-111. The USN was completely marginalized. Few of their needs were taken into consideration and they ended up with an a/c they couldn’t use. I am concerned that it’s either going to be a replay of that, with either the Navy or USAF not having their needs met OR that both will have to make concessions and neither will be happy. Time will tell, but that is my biggest concern.
BTW, Rolls makes the lift fan on the F-35. It’s not as if they don’t have any business on this a/c.
The J-52, powerplant of the A-4, A-6, and thus EA-6B Prowler. Originally designed for the bullpup missile as a one time use engine. It’s a turbojet so not terribly fuel efficient, and is the loudest engine on the flight deck. The heat shielding, not required for turbofans with the cushion of insulating fan air, frequently melts through in spots and the internal batting goes to hell quickly. The bearings (particularly the 4.5) are so bad they’re on either a 5 or 10 hour oil lab cycle and frequently need to be changed to prevent in flight failures (a good preventive maintenance/RCM program but maintenance labor and cost intensive.) A solid performing engine at low altitude surely. Maintenance-wise? Pain. in. the. a$$.
Certainly concur with you about the F-111 though, which raises the hairs on the back of my neck big time. We had a retired three star come talk to us recently and on the F-35 said the last time this was done was the F-4, as in Air Force, Navy and Marines operating the same jet, but clearly forgetting that the F-4 was designed as a Navy interceptor (single role), to a Navy requirement and by a Navy/McDonnel-Douglas team. The Air Force and Marines liked what they saw and bought minimally different versions after the fact, and it got pressed into its strike role which it happened to be decent at. Further the F-4 never approached anywhere near the 90% of fighter inventory for the entire US Armed Forces the F-35 is slated to do. That number quite frankly frightens me. And while there’s surely hard data out there that may prove me wrong, in my brief, anectdotal experience I’ve seen more red stripes for airframe issues than for engines.
The Navy could simply outfit half the squadrons in an air wing with the F135 and the other half with the F136. Have all the similarly-engined squadrons from the air wing deploy together, meaning you only need one set of spares and maintenance equipment while the ship is out to sea, but still have spares back at the NAS. Additionally, if there are problems such as QA, labor strikes, or acts of God, then the entire air wing isn’t SOL.
For the reasons Bou points out, the Navy will probably neck down to a single source, at least on each carrier. There’s room for two strands of engine type and and even SE (we do it now for FA-18C, which has two kinds of GE engines available based on aircraft lot, and FA-18E/F which has yet another), but logistically it would be a hassle. Doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep USAF and FMS options open.
How many different turbine engine types would the maintenance dets with a CVW have to stock 15, 20 years ago?
Are you saying that such complexity is too much today?
It may be preferable to rely on as few powerplant types as possible, but it’s hardly vital.
With this administration, the entire Reagan defense buildup is in the noise band.
ok, thass funny raht thar, I don’t care who ya are…
Keeping that one (“from mastodons to virgin princesses”)
And there is one more thing that people don’t realize with the engine manufacturers. Propulsion becomes emotional. Think of the type of car you drive… people truly get wrapped in what THEY feel is the best brand, which brand gives them their best reliability as well as performance. Ford families, ‘I only buy CHEVY’ people, folks who swear once you go Toyota you’ll never go back… people are emotionally vested in what they drive.
This goes with air propulsion too. Like it or not, it does. When you have an O-2 or O-3 cutting their teeth on GE engines and that’s all they’ve known and they’ve loved the performance and that motor has gotten them out of a few binds, that is what they know, that is what they love. Come 20+ years down the road, when now said O-2′s and -3′s are in positions of the decision making process as to what is going to power the latest and greatest… they ARE going to lean towards what they know, what they are comfortable with, what they like, unless of course the manufacturer seriously pissed someone off (think PW in the 70s.)
So what you’re seeing here also is a power play for PW to get back INTO the Navy. They haven’t had a brand new USN contract in forever and a day. They blew it in the 70s and it’s still hanging over them. This is their opportunity to have influence in a whole new generation of Navy fighter/attack pilots. GE also sees, if they get shut out of the F-35 as they have the F-22, it’s not just engine and spares sales, it’s potential loss to get one’s foot in the door 20 years from now when every pilot out there sleep eats and breathes their PW engine and has… for a long time.
And on a sidenote, notice I said Vietnam Vets referring to J52s. I’d not ask anyone of my generation what they think. It’s 40+ year old technology. But back in it’s day? When it was THE propulsion system like the F119 is to the F22? It couldn’t be beat.
Dual sourcing shouldn’t be a problem – as long as the engines themselves are “plug-in” replaceable between airframes.
That means that the only thing that should be needed to swap a P&W for a GE engine should be to pull all the connectors, unbolt it, slide it out, slide in the other manufacturer’s engine, hook everything up again – and maybe load a different engine control firmware.
If they can’t do that… forget it and single source it. Although it seems that having a Rolls-Royce engine in the mix would help with foreign sales.
Funny I’ve not seen anybody mention building under license. Rolls Royce’s Merlin motor was produced by several manufacturers, under license, just to meet the needs of the day. We all know of the venerable Colt M1911 being produced by everybody and their dog, including the guide lamp division of General Motors and the Singer sewing machine company. The M1 Garand was even built under license by the International Harvester Corporation!
So where am I going with this? Can anybody else think of a company with the tooling, in-house talent and workforce capable of producing airframes and jet engines but absolutely no desire to break into and compete in those markets on their own? Companies with a heavily-unionized workforce sitting on their laurels while the public doesn’t buy their products? Companies we might have given a whole boatload of money to recently?
While having a single airframe and a single engine do make for a single point of failure should one or the other have a problem that requires grounding the fleet for a time, there is no reason that work stoppages or natural disaster need stop the production of same. Further, if the design specs are properly laid out with respect to the airframe there’s no reason the engines themselves cannot be of two different designs, so long as they both bolt up using the same connectors — think small-block Chevy, the internals are different but one bolts in place of another.
At sea you’re replacing engines more than you’re doing serious rebuilds in the airframe — the parts you need to carry are the consumables, for the rest you swap engines and either rebuild on the bench or send the remains back to the factory for a replacement, right? Having multiple manufacturers should make it more cost-effective to replace rather than rebuild, and I’d expect that engine to find itself used in other roles as the manufacturing costs decrease with scale.
Were I a betting man, I’d bet on GM and Chrysler having parts of this contract.
– Max