On F-35
Posted on InsideDefense.com: April 25, 2014
The commander of the Joint Strike Fighter training wing at Eglin Air Force Base, FL, last week made a number of recommendations for raising F-35 reliability rates -- a lingering problem the Pentagon is working to remedy, but in a way that is mindful of the concurrency built into the aircraft, according to a senior program office official.
A core suggestion from Col. Todd Canterbury, the commander of the 33rd Fighter Wing, is to have more engineering expertise on site in the Florida Panhandle. That would allow the wing to resolve issues faster and clear aircraft for flight more quickly, and it is a solution that could potentially be applied at any operating base. And yet, the concurrent development, production, testing, fielding and modification of the F-35 is leading the joint program office to keep most of its engineering expertise at Lockheed Martin's manufacturing plant in Fort Worth, TX, for now. In an April 24 interview -- her first since joining the JPO -- F-35 Director of Sustainment Joann Berrett articulated program leadership's rationale for that approach and discussed what the JPO is doing in the interim to make more Joint Strike Fighters available for flight.
Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, the F-35 program executive officer, has said many times over the last year that reliability rates are improving more slowly than expected, which hampers the pace of all JSF activities at a time the program is on a tight schedule to hit a number of key milestones. Canterbury echoed those sentiments in an April 22 interview with Inside the Air Force, and Eglin AFB hosts the largest inventory of F-35s in the world today, giving wing leadership significant insight into the maturity of the aircraft.
He picked out four main ideas being briefed to senior leaders that, if adopted, may help improve aircraft availability at Eglin AFB and other JSF bases.
The first involves the time it is taking for off-site engineers to respond to calls for assistance, formally known as action requests (ARs).
"The airplane is so new that we're submitting these requests to the engineers, and they have to do a detailed analysis of it and get the answer back to us," he said. "While that process and analysis is going down, the airplane is sitting down and we can't fly it. We'd like more engineering adjudication authority here on station, whether that means assigning folks here to look at the problem to allow us to make an on-scene determination of whether it's repairable or what the fix is as opposed to sending it out to engineers at the Lightning Support Team."
The second is a direct result of the first -- slow AR response times have created a backlog of requests that must be addressed for F-35s to be allowed back into the skies. Canterbury said devolving more AR authority to local bases, or assigning JPO staff capable of handling those issues to operating sites, would likely alleviate both issues.
Berrett said the program office hopes to eventually send engineering personnel from the primarily government-staffed Lightning Support Team to F-35 sites, but it is probably too soon to do so, and the program has manpower limitations that make that difficult in any case. At this point, the JPO feels it is best to keep its largest contingent of sustainment personnel at the JSF factory in Texas.
"Ultimately I will tell you, do we want to potentially get the cadre of people at Fort Worth smaller and dispersed? Yes," she said. "But again, as a maturing weapon system, that's where we need them at the moment, looking at our [joint technical data], looking at our inspections, working with Lockheed Martin, so that is the right place for them where we are currently with the program. That does not mean that cadre would always be there and be at the size that it is today."
Berrett also mentioned that having engineering expertise on site at an operating base is a common practice for the Navy, but not for the Air Force, and so assigning engineering personnel to Eglin AFB would require a kind of conceptual adjustment from the Air Force. The service usually houses those experts at platform program offices, said Berrett, who has spent the vast majority of her 30-year career working on F-16 and A-10 aircraft sustainment out of Hill Air Force Base, UT.
Some hesitation from the program office to assign Lightning Support Team staff to F-35 bases does not mean the JPO is ignoring concerns raised by field units. Berrett gave an example last week in which the program office cleared a new sealant for use on non-stealthy aircraft surfaces that takes only 12 hours to cure, as opposed to 48 hours for the previously used substance. That will make more airplanes available more frequently, reducing the rates of aircraft deemed non-mission-capable because of maintenance. Yet program officials should not expect to see dramatic statistical improvement right away, she stressed.
The sustainment director raised one additional option being considered that will likely be welcomed by 33rd Fighter Wing operators: the possibility of moving aircraft inspections to the end of the day instead of conducting them mid-day, which pulls jets out of the operational rotation during flying hours.
Canterbury raised two other issues that will be long-term F-35 performance challenges, one of which is the Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS). ALIS is meant to make maintaining the F-35 radically simpler than legacy platforms, but it has hit multiple developmental obstacles and requires many workarounds to function effectively. According to Canterbury and as stated by other F-35 operators this spring, a recently delivered ALIS software update has significantly improved the system's performance, speeding up some processes from minutes to seconds. But a drastically better software load, called ALIS 2.0, won't be available until early next year, so the system may continue to hamper the military services' F-35 maintenance capabilities.
The final issue the colonel highlighted -- which the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy must deal with differently -- is manning maintenance units with appropriately trained and experienced technicians. Canterbury said the Air Force is "reassessing" its manning figures to make sure the proper amount of crew chiefs, mechanics and back-shop workers are being worked into the F-35 program, and to feel comfortable with the experience level of each of those maintainers. Very few Air Force personnel are familiar with JSF-specific maintenance because of the jet's very recent introduction into the fleet, but the service will want to ensure that technicians with years of experience working on other platforms are involved in training and overseeing recently certified maintainers.
As it works to address these and other issues that limit F-35 reliability, maintainability and availability, the JSF program is in a stage of maturation that requires dozens of aircraft to be sent to depots for modifications, some of which are quite lengthy. Those are linked to general F-35 manufacturing improvements, but more centrally to the requirement to meet Marine Corps initial operational capability and Air Force operational test needs by next year and Air Force operational capability in 2016.
Berrett recognized that taking so many aircraft out of operational status may lead reliability rates to actually fall, even if the reliability of aircraft available for flight is climbing.
"This is something that I'm trying to bring forward to [Gen. Bogdan] in some charts that we're putting together. . . . We will have a lot of aircraft being inducted into mod for us to be able to meet Marine Corps IOC, OT, a lot of other things, and even as we improve [reliability and maintainability, R&M], we will be taking more aircraft down to go into mods," she said. "So to some degree, the improvements that we make in R&M may be masked because we've taken more aircraft down to get them modified."
Like with most paradoxes associated with the F-35, that one can be directly attributed to concurrency. In 2015, for example, the Marine Corps hopes to declare its first operational squadron ready for deployment. At the same time, developmental test will continue, operational test will begin, low-rate production will go on and include more international aircraft, a pair of new bases will begin flight operations, organic depot facilities will perform maintenance and modification work on more aircraft, and Lockheed Martin will continue refining the last developmental software block that all F-35 operators require for more advanced capability.
