Part 1 of Way back when gives a good snapshot of the gross over optimism with forecasting the future of the F-35 program. The bit below is also from a 2002 briefing to Australian elected officials. Bold emphasis mine.
DAVID SCOTT: Well, the design objectives on the JSF program are to cut the O and S cost by 50 per cent. And what we do is we have several bases for doing that. One is there's a high reliability in the airplane. The systems are designed to be inherently highly reliable, such as the radar which we project it will not require servicing of the antennae during its lifetime as it has full tolerance built in.
The second feature is a prognostics and health management system which monitors key systems within the airplane, such as the engine, measuring vibration and temperature and comparing those to known parameters, projecting when there'll be failure rates, and some other systems of that nature. So that allows us, we believe to project that the cost of maintaining this airplane will be 50 per cent less than the Legacy airplanes.
Obviously there'll be a combination to maintain these airplanes of military and industrial sides. The military side will clearly handle the flight line, maintenance, those kind of activities, and the contractors will handle the global supply chain, management of the spares and those sorts of things.
In between, we're still in evaluation and discussion about exactly which side the government or the industry handles some of those activities and, in the case of Australia, we have not yet begun those discussions about what they want to do indigenously, what they care to do as part of the global supply chain. So those decisions will have to evolve over the next few years.
Compare this to what we know today.
2 comments:
Thanks for the snapshot.
It seems like a pre-conceived Program partnership and success from inception.
Sometimes I feel clubbed like a baby seal, after reading some of Eric's blogs.
Part 1 :
"What you have in JSF is true interchangeability. If your country, for example, decided to buy a joint strike fighter with Pratt and Whitney engines and then went to a coalition operation fore-deployed somewhere and there were only GE engines there, and they needed a new engine, a Pratt and Whitney engine can be pulled out. The GE could be put in to the aircraft. The software load is the same. The airplane recognises that. So all the hardware and software interfaces are all the same, including not only the interface into the aircraft, but also the supportability. So the mechanics can switch out those engines. It'd be the same tooling to switch out the engines and so forth. So the support piece of that is also interchangeable."
Sure sounds like an interesting concept, that whole plug and play thing plus all the benefits of having a second source engine! Too bad we are left with only P&W engine and the IPP which takes 2 days to remove....
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