Lockheed Dismisses Korea F-35 Schedule Issue

SINGAPORE — A Pentagon decision to reduce near-term F-35 purchases will not hinder Lockheed Martin from meeting South Korea’s demand for an early 2016 first delivery under the F-X3 fighter program, insists David Scott, director of F-35 international customer engagement for the prime contractor.

Current production capacity can build 48 aircraft annually, and with the U.S. looking to buy around 30 aircraft per year, there are slots to meet South Korea’s demands, as well as other near-term international buyers such as Japan, Turkey, Italy and Norway.

A Joint Strike Fighter steering board will convene soon to update and reconcile purchase plans. If there is need for extra tooling to be acquired either at Lockheed Martin or in the F-35 supply chain, there would be time to do so, Scott says.

The South Korean competition to supply 60 fighters will pit the F-35A against the Boeing F-15 Silent Eagle and, potentially, European bidders.

The international buys also will help maintain production of F-35s at a more economical rate, Scott notes.

Lockheed Martin would need a waiver to sell the fighter to South Korea because of a U.S. prohibition of exporting hardware before an aircraft has entered service with the U.S. The waiver is likely to be granted, though, with the U.S. government having already granted one for Japan.

Still unclear is what the next big F-35 competition will be overseas. The focus, after South Korea, likely will shift to solidifying plans with Singapore, Australia and others already involved in the program at various levels.

 

-aviationweek.com

-aerospaceweb.org

Fighters vie in Korean F-X Phase 3 program

South Korea aims to choose a supplier for 60 advanced fighters next year, balancing industrial ambitions against a need to deter North Korea and concerns about emerging Chinese and Russian air-to-air threats.

Contenders for the F-X Phase 3 program are the Boeing F-15SE Silent Eagle, Eurofighter Typhoon and Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

Each has merits. Local industry is helping to develop the Silent Eagle, a stealthier version of the F-15K, and makes major parts for all F-15s, while the air force shows strong signs of wanting the F-35’s stealth for the crucial strike mission. In a market dominated by U.S. manufacturers, the Typhoon must rely heavily on its flight performance and on Eurofighter’s great scope for technology transfer.

The Typhoon was little more than a stalking horse in F-X Phase 1, in which Boeing won an order for 40 F-15Ks in 2002. Only Boeing bid for F-X Phase 2, resulting in a contract for 21 more F-15Ks in 2008. The F-X requirement emerged in the late 1980s and has met repeated budgetary delays. Phase 3 will not move to a decision next year unless parliament allocates money for the aircraft.

The Phase 3 aircraft would partly replace F-4 Phantoms and F-5 Tigers, and would be replaced in the strike role by 2030 by a domestically developed combat drone. Even with the new aircraft, the fighter force will drop to 400 from 500 by 2020.

South Korea faces more than 300 North Korean heavy artillery pieces in range of Seoul, and, far from the border, an uncertain number of nuclear ballistic missiles of unknown quality. The ability to rapidly knock out guns and missiles that threaten cities while pounding command bunkers is critically important. The air threat from North Korea is not an immediate concern.

South Korean fighters would not fly more than 1,000 km (621 mi.) to destroy North Korean nuclear missiles. The most northerly F-15K base is 430 km from Pyongyang. Also, China and Russia may introduce their own stealth fighters—the Chengdu J-20 and Sukhoi PAK-FA, respectively—this decade.

An ability to penetrate hostile airspace covertly, the strongest selling point of the F-35, is an “immensely important capability,” said air force Col. Taek-Hwan Song, at a seminar in Seoul in May. Song, leader of the department that plans air force requirements, expressed a relaxed view on the affordability of the F-35 and its schedule for service entry, despite cost overruns and delays. “A general misunderstanding about the fifth-generation stealth fighter is that it is expensive; it’s never too expensive,” he said. As for the aim of putting the F-X Phase 3 aircraft into service in 2018, just as the U.S. Air Force makes the F-35 operational, he notes that South Korea’s definition of operational is less demanding than that of USAF.

The Silent Eagle has the advantage of offering more work to Korea Aerospace Industries, which builds the wings and forward fuselages of F-15s for all customers and is helping to develop and make the conformal weapon bays fitted on the sides of the proposed stealthier version, for munitions, equipment and fuel. The stealthier F-15 would also have much commonality with 60 F-15Ks, cutting operational costs, though the version would be unique to South Korea unless Saudi Arabia, a potential customer, also buys it.

The Typhoon has an advantage over U.S. competitors on the issue of technology transfer that South Korea demands for its proposed KF-X fighter in the 2020s, since Eurofighter partners EADS and BAE Systems are not subject to Washington’s strict controls. Moreover, U.S. support for Asian fighter programs has consistently avoided creating competitors for U.S. aircraft.

Eurofighter says its aircraft can counter stealthy attackers. A flight of Typhoons flying in a wall formation can detect them at operationally useful ranges by sharing and triangulating azimuth data from passive sensors. Typhoons may even have detected Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptors that way last year.

Such counter-stealth capability would be valued against the J-20 and PAK-FA, but one F-X Phase 3 program official says an excellent strike capability would be valued more highly. Unless the South Korean air force, structured for combined operations with the U.S. Air Force against North Korea, transformed into a force for unilateral action, chances for a non-U.S. aircraft buy seem low.

 

-aviationweek.com

F-16 A Surrogate At JSF Training Wing

Fortune has graced us with time,” says Col. David Hlatky, commander of the 33rd Fighter Wing at Eglin AFB, Florida, which is the F-35 multinational pilot and maintenance schoolhouse.

Time has been on the training wing’s side, as prime contractor Lockheed Martin struggles to work through flight trials and provide aircraft for training at the base. The first aircraft were expected there last year, when the wing was working to what Hlatky acknowledges was an aggressive schedule to start flight training last fall. “This is a better glide path,” Hlatky says of a wing startup plan that was revised in accordance with the Pentagon’s decision to restructure the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program.

While working to resolve technical problems and ramp up flight-testing, Lockheed Martin is also having to dedicate significant attention to fixing persistent problems with the visor-mounted helmet display system, made by Vision Systems International (VSI—a Rockwell Collins/Elbit Systems joint venture). Lockheed Martin on March 1 issued a draft specification for proposals for an alternate helmet-mounted display system that makes use of commercial, off-the-shelf night-vision goggles, according to John Kent, a Lockheed spokesman. A final request for proposals is expected by the end of the month, and a selection by the end of June. Candidates include BAE Systems, Gentex and VSI, Kent says.

Continuing problems on the helmet-mounted display system include jitter in the data that appear on the visor and problems with the night-vision capability. The wing at Eglin is making preparations for flight training with the VSI system; officials there have already begun custom-molding helmets for early instructor pilots. Should VSI fail to execute fixes, it is unclear how quickly an alternate design can be fed into the training wing’s operations.

U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. C.D. Moore, deputy JSF program manager, says that the alternate helmet system has resources in the program plan, so funding is not an issue at this time.

Meanwhile, AF 8, a conventional, takeoff-and-landing (CTOL) production version, is expected to arrive at Eglin as early as May with as many as five additional aircraft by September, when the wing is slated to be ready for pilot training.

In the interim, the F-35s delivered to Eglin will be used for maintainer training. Moore says program officials are looking at the option of potentially conducting some limited flight-training operations prior to September. However, a lot is riding on how much of the flight envelope is cleared by the flight-test program.

Leading up to September, AF 6 and AF 7, instrumented CTOL versions that were to go to Eglin but were diverted to support flight trials at Edwards AFB, Calif., will undergo a series of what Moore calls “maturity flights.” He says these are needed prior to a brief operational assessment so officials can be confident there will be no “seams” when the aircraft are cleared for flight training at Eglin. “Until I get the maturity stuff from Edwards, we are going to turn . . . aircraft over to the maintainers” for training at Eglin, Moore said March 1.

In the meantime, the wing is following a traditional “walk, crawl, run” path, Hlatky says, that began last month with the use of four Lockheed Martin F-16s pulled from Luke AFB, Texas. They are surrogates for the wing to restart flight operations and maintain pilot proficiency while waiting for delivery of its first F-35s. “We get to teach this wing to fly all over again,” Hlatky says. “This wing hadn’t turned a wheel in months.” It formerly operated Boeing F-15s.

The F-16s are currently being housed in shelters at the wing’s budding facility across from the Northwest Florida Regional Airport passenger terminal, which is located on the opposite side of the taxiway from Eglin’s operations.

The F-16s are slated for use at the 33rd Wing for one year, Hlatky says.

Meanwhile, the majority of the construction on the Academic Training Center—the size of six football fields—is complete. U.S. Marine Corps Col. Arthur Tomassetti, wing vice commander, says the first full-mission system trainer, a simulation-based device, is being installed; it takes about 90 days until it is operational. The wing is slated to receive eight, though there is space for 10.

The wing will operate 59 F-35s.

-aviationweek.com