The Fort Wort Star-Telegram has a pre-postmortem on the F-35 schedule delays. As usual, it comes down to a fundamental lack of realism on the front end, in terms of technology risk, schedule and cost, and change management in process, as engineers were dedicated to re-working the Marines’ F-35B STOVL variant for weight creep:
By early 2003, as engineers at Lockheed and other contractors worked out more than 50,000 detailed computer drawings for individual parts and structures, the software predicted that the basic airplane would be too heavy for the Marines’ version to carry out its assigned missions. Lockheed and the Pentagon decided the best way to attack the weight problem was to redesign the airplane from end-to-end…
(Costs) soared and delays snowballed. Suppliers had already bought machines and tools, hired and trained people, and were beginning to produce parts.They had no choice, for the most part, but to shut down and wait for new drawings.
Then, getting the supply chain back up to speed proved problematic. Lockheed and its partners were often demanding parts but slow in delivering new designs to the suppliers. Managing and coordinating all the changes turned into a quagmire, according to some former Lockheed employees, with one hand not knowing what the other was doing and top management often unaware of how badly the process was snarled.
“We had a period where we had a large amount of changes,” Burbage said. “It was like a rat going through a snake.”
It’s worth keeping in mind that these are some of our country’s most successful industries, run by effective leadership employing brilliant engineers. This isn’t the B team.
But it’s also worth keeping in mind that major weapons systems take so long to bring from CONOPS to deployment that probably none of these folks have done anything remotely so complex and difficult as creating a fresh airplane from loosely crafted requirements to “shadows on the ramp” before at the same experience level. You could almost spend your entire working career moving up the ladder in a program like F-35. A fresh-faced scrub out of college could start as an associate or intern to a low-level IPT and 15 or 20 years later be in charge of his own engineering team without ever having really understood the puts and takes performed by his predecessors – to him, they’re just “facts of life” to deal with. By the time LMCO is next awarded a new development contract, all of the senior engineers and management personnel from F-35 may have retired, taking all of their war wounds and battle scars with them.
Managing engineering changes on a developmental program is crucial, and it’s an important part of the systems engineer’s role to ensure that the effects of changes so sub-assembly a.2 are reflected in the behavior of interfacing assembly b, for example. Hard though engineering change management might be, we largely have a handle on that.
Managing the change in personnel as you move through program maturity? I’m not so sure about that.
Ready, Fire, Aim. If you build it the requirements will come.
I ran into a similar situation: we were building a little 500 ton product tanker for the island trade and had run into numerous discepancies with the CAD drawings from the marine architect. I was called to a meeting concerning the engine room module and our plans for beginning to assemble and test same. I walked in, looked at the architects rep and Purchasing and more or less told them, “As soon as the two of you A) decided on what you want to buy so you know the ‘footprint’ of same, and you re-draw the entire engineroom down to the penetrations in the shell, bulkheads and decks, then B) I’ll get right to work. Until then, don’t bother me. I’m only going to cut and assemble the engine room ONCE and it’ll be right the first time.
Of course, I understand that such work practices simply won’t work in the aerospace industry…
Aerospace is schedule driven. What is the party line? Tell the truth and get slammed. Upper management does not want to hear the bad news. Just make those metrics. Schedule equals bonuses for big dogs. Sounds like some of your guys came from Aerospace….
By the way, once you got direct with your architects rep and Purchasing, you will probably have a management reputation as a trouble maker.
Flight test has the reputation for finding problems-especially when the certification program becomes a development and certification program…
Yup, no longer work there. Didn’t care. I learned 40 years ago that shipbuilding is a dirty hard job; never make it any harder than it needs to be. When they tried to get me to buy off on a sh!t sandwhich, I handed it back to them and told them what I was going to accept. Owner of the ship told me much later that he was damn glad I was hard headed about it.
Aero-Bracero, amen to that one. The schedule is king and may or may not reflect any challenges that come up.
Anybody remember the Challenger disaster? Party line, schedule, and politics sent up a roman candle. Too bad we never learn…
I’m in a situation that this reminds me of now. Locomotives are getting pretty modern, with emissions control and electronics, but nothing is really revolutionary, more along the lines of evolutionary. We’ve recently hired a young engineer and he’s been put in charge of the design for a small electrical cabinet. Well, unfortunately, he didn’t think it was important to see what had been done in the past and started designing from scratch. Now we’re redesigning everything to actually work with the locomotive and to be buildable by our shop. And guess who gets to do the redesign? Educated doesn’t always mean smart.
I sat through a presentation about 25 years back by a middle aged gent who held a PhD in Industrial Engineering. He started out as a shop floor machinist. Biggest challenge for him at that time were the engineers who designed items that he said were unworkable – you could not actually assemble the prototype parts. When he or his colleagues pointed this out, said engineer would come down from the high places to berate the shop personnel. Eventually they would machine the the un-usable parts – he called it the Theory of Malicious Compliance. Invariably these were young engineers who knew better than anyone because they went to school. The story continued with the observation that the best engineers were the ones who came down to the shop and discussed their designs with the guys on the machine tools.
Sounds like nuthin’s changed… just gotten more expensive.
Bring back the steam locomotive!
George V.
Sounds like the young engineer (speaking as another one) was insufficiently lazy. What has come before, what you know will work because it has worked for 30+ years, is great to use as a design base partially because you don’t have to think as hard as to the “how” it will work. Now, this gets thrown out the window when a new challenge comes up or you’re forced to toss away the old basis, but that should be one of those “last resort” kind of things.
The younger guys in the department I work in all think like this.
My Dad was an aero engineer from the slide rule days with LTV (Ling Temco Vought) which was absorbed by Lockheed Martin. After he retired, LM asked him to consult with one of their teams on the F35 development. He came away very dismayed at the level of understanding of aerodynamics by the young engineers LM was hiring. He wrote a tutorial (on his own time) to help bring some of them up to speed on some of the basics.
I knew an Engineer in Nashville that was so disappointed with new Engineering grads that he quit hiring new grads. The Engineering schools are a shadow of what they used to be. very few faculty have any experience of day to day Engineering and have no understanding of it. So, guess what they produce?
So where did we lose the ability that produced the likes of the SR-71, the U-2, and yes, even the 117 without a 12 year design program? Add the Saturn 5 to that mix.
With the new Boeing plant being built right next door to the office, I have to laugh at the constant propaganda about “new, hi-tech, paperless design, etc” we hear about. My comment to one new-in-town Boeing-ite at a chamber function was “if yer so dadgummed “advanced and hi tech” why are you so late in producing?”
G-man, we lost it to the program management blather tar-pits. It takes 2-3 years to get a specification written and approved…another two to three years to put it out to bid, get bids back, make a source selection, and fight the now-inevitable protest.
THEN you get to do actual detailed design. Or rather, to start on a year worth of specification decomposition. Then some design work, followed by endless preparation of Powerpoint slides for design reviews. Prepare slides, review slides, revise slides, and present slides. Plus pumping effort into earned value management ratholes, tracking to three and four significant figures estimates that were valid only to one or two figures.
The current system values process. The product is merely a useful byproduct.
Amen.
Don’t forget the mid-operation spec change, where half of the work needs to be thrown out and another half needs to be spent figuring out what you can save.
Outstanding point, Lex.
Back in the First World War, an engieer might design a new airplane every year. By the Second World War, this had stretched out to about every third or fourth year. By the Vietnam War, new design competitions were a twice-a-decade affair.
Today? Once in a generation. Which means that the experience level is pretty low…and people who know where the decisions were made on a program in the early days are few, far between, and rarely listened to.
I’ve long maintained that studying program histories pays big dividends.
Sadly this is an indictment of the specialization of the technical and engineering side of the business. Some of the young engineers spend their careers desining fasterners, with little understanding of their applications beyond the objective and threshold paramters. These HUGE weapon systems programs that absolutely blow past budget estimates by 25, 50 or 75% have a domino effect on all defense spending. If JSF, F-22, LCS, Army’s FWS and others were not collectively billions over current budget with projected 100′s of billions over during the life of the contract – we would not have arbitrary % cuts across the board. I would prefer they under promise and over deliver vice the other way around.
Wonderful.
Get congress’ greasy fingers out of procurement processes.
Get all the top ranking officers with their own pet parts of each program out of the picture.
Enforce KISS.
Get a program specification with some semblance of reality. What can and can not be done.
Force a prototype and flyoff program ala David Packard and the Light Weight Fighter program and the A-X program. (Got us the F-16,F/A-18 and the A-10).
Actually ask the end user and recipient of the services what they might need and want in a program, be it a battle rifle or a fighter plane.
And Don’t ever expect the unit cost to go down by cutting the program buy. That is just F**kstick stupid. R&D is a fixed cost if 150 or 1,500 of an item are built.
Bracero, you left the F-22 off that list. Yes that’s right; it was “winner” of the fly-off against the YF-23′s produced by NGS. Of course, both of the YF-23′s were still flying at the end of that competition and NEITHER of the two YF-22’s were (one having burned up on the flight line and the other crashing on the runway, good video showing that here: http://www.takeofftube.com/view/10/talking-cat-kim/).
The problem is that the DOD continues to reward failure. Once the F-22 broke that cost ceiling LM should have been sanctioned and they should never have gotten the JSF contract with the F-22 track record.
Too bad for us all, no one can argue that we don’t need more F-22’s but at what cost? I am waiting for the F-35 buy to shrink as well.
BT: Jimmy T sends.
I worked the EMD F-22 program. I dont think the flyoff or at least parts of it were honest. Pratt got the motor contract. GE had the better motor(more thrust).
A large part of the F-22 program cost overrun has been USAF’s idea of gold plating everything. ALL the fancy bells and whistles were added. Any Col. or General with a pet idea was pushing it. Too much Gee-whizz b.s. (just my opinion).
There were also some that said certain LM Program VPs dealt in herpetologic lubricants.
Inability to meet one set of specialized requirements involved in 10% of the buy has endangered the entire program. The problem is not in design or engineering. It’s all about Pentagon politics. The tail continues to wag the dog.
This isn’t a case where the engineers blew it, this is a result of Sales people selling what the customer wants to hear and then not listening to engineering or even asking them more likely. On a cost plus contract you only have to bid what you know and you can make assumptions where you don’t know. This leads some companies to promise more than they are ever likely to be able to deliver but it is a legal way to bid.
What is needed is a customer who can see that too many miracles have to happen and that too little knowledge was put into the bid. The customer has to be smart enough to see that the bid is a guess and that inadequate time and money are available to really do the job. Unfortunately the customer is also trying to sell their program to the DoD and generally want to get pregnant before admitting that there might be cost/schedule problems.
Don’t tell us why you can’t fix it. Tell us how you will!
Hammer.
I’m thinking that requisition alone might take two years (bangs head on wall).
Two years? You are ARE and optimist.
That’s why it’s always important to become and stay friends with your supply guys. Food, leave, and parts. Anyone who controls any of those is my close personal friend.