The subdued red field in the chart below shows what industry was promised is quite a bit different than what is happening. That is a lot of missing orders. Corporate carcasses indeed.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
F-35 industry missing out on orders
Governments--in this example; Canada--can spin how great home industry effort is for the F-35 program, yet there is the simple fact that there are a lot of missing orders for the SMEs (those critical jobs that are very fragile under this high risk program).
The subdued red field in the chart below shows what industry was promised is quite a bit different than what is happening. That is a lot of missing orders. Corporate carcasses indeed.
The subdued red field in the chart below shows what industry was promised is quite a bit different than what is happening. That is a lot of missing orders. Corporate carcasses indeed.
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If I was really motivated and didn't have nothing else to do tonight but since I still have a lot of work I ain't going to do it, I would spend some time looking at some of the more successful programs like A4, F4, F16, maybe F15 and see how fast they "ramped" up production. That curve after 2012 and then picks up even more in 13 seems very steep.
My question would be what are the historical "average" ramp up speeds in US fighter programs? Have we ever seen fighter jet production ramp up that fast? Pretty sure prop fighters in WW2 ramped up pretty fast but I don't think the context and complexity match today's production of modern jets. That's why I think we should compare more modern fighters like F4, F5 or F16 rates to proposed F35 rates.
A major part of the problem is that they are doing everything backwards in the F-35 program.
They are producing lots of stuff before it has been figured out instead of figuring out something and producing it.
Sounds simple, but it is their undoing.
In 1972?, F4 production hit 72 aircraft a month.
I believe that Australia will possibly, order up to 100 of these machines.
We had a few local firms promised bits and pieces and crumbs from the table.
The Japanese may order anywhere between 60 and 120.
From press releases, it would appear that they get to assemble the machine, manufacture parts of a few large and other important subassemblies, and manufacture the engine.
The transfer of technology is staggering.
It would look like that whoever is in charge of the wreck is called Defence and the DMO, have really wangled the best deal.
Congratulations.
It would definitely behoove any current Partner to study feasibility of dropping out of the Partnership end and then rejoining as an FMS customer. The bargaining power and market force at play as an FMS customer, seems to blow away any perceived benefit of being a Partner.
One could go to LM right now and pre-order mature block IV jets at a fixed cost of $75m per unit (LM/DoD can deal with any actual net loss, making it up on the back-end US orders), negotiate near-term offsets at whatever level requested, negotiate component and final assembly share for long-term production, ask for free use of F-16s in the meanwhile during the delayed wait... oh, well, maybe that could be used as bargaining leverage.
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