The Boeing 735 MAX isn't the Only Aircraft with Problems. Take the Lockheed Martin F-35 Fighter, for Example.
by John Lawrence, January 16, 2019
By now it's doubtful whether Boeing's 735 MAX will ever fly again. Probably it should not given that it is a design kluge that was supposed to be fixed by computer software, something like squaring the circle. Then there's Lockheed's F-35. It was supposed to replace Lockheed's F-22, a plane that couldn't help but be successful since it's development and production was spread over 44 states. That gave it 88 Senators when it came to voting on it. Despite cost overruns and a lack of performance, the F-22 program was continued but scaled down. It made little difference to Lockheed Martin in the long run because the F-35 program, also a Lockheed product was scaled up. Republican Tom Price excoriated President Obama for his decision to cut back the F-22 program saying, "It' outrageous that President Obama is willing to bury the country under a mountain of debt with his reckless domestic agenda but refuses to fund programs critical to our national defense."
William D Hartung in his book Prophets of War says:
"The most amazing thing about the F-22 affair was that Lockheed Martin was so large, and involved in so many weapons systems, that in the end, despite all its alarmist rhetoric, the company may well have come out ahead of the game under the [Secretary of Defense] Gates budget package, owing in large part to the counterbalancing increases in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, designed to be the largest project in the history of military aviation."
Almost immediately the F-35 program was beset by schedule slippages and cost overruns. By 2014, 13 years after Lockheed won the contract for the F-35, only one actual plane had been produced. That plane was supposed to debut at an airshow in Britain, but never made the flight due to an accident that almost killed a pilot. According to the New York Times Magazine: "Officials from the Pentagon and the aircraft’s manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, had eagerly anticipated the opportunity to show off a working, flying F-35 after a decade of delays and spiraling cost overruns. The F-35 initiative is the Defense Department’s most expensive weapons program ever, expected to cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion over its 60-year lifespan." But the plane, having provided a jobs program for the last 20 years, is already obsolete. It flew a couple missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and dropped a few bombs on some ISIS fighters, but that's a total waste of what was supposed to be the world's most advanced fighter. It has yet to be in a dogfight, the mission it was supposedly designed for.
The Times article goes on:
Yet even as the program plows forward, unresolved technical issues have continued to emerge. In June, my colleagues and I at Defense News reported that the plane still faced at least 13 severe technical deficiencies during operational testing, including spikes in cabin pressure, some rare instances of structural damage at supersonic speeds and unpredictability while conducting extreme maneuvers — all problems that could affect the pilot’s safety or jeopardize a mission’s success. At the same time, the F-35s already delivered to squadrons have introduced new complications: On military bases around the United States, the high cost of operating the aircraft, a shortage of spare parts and a challenging new approach to updating the jet’s crucial software code have program officials and military leaders urgently looking for solutions. Still, they assure the public that nothing will prevent the program from moving forward. It’s a stance that breaks with the advice of the Government Accountability Office, which advised that all serious problems should be resolved before transitioning to full-rate production.
They have a big problem getting spare parts some of which may take up to a year to obtain since they come from all over the world. In both 2017 and 2018, only about half of the United States’ F-35 fleet was available to fly at a given time, with the rest down for maintenance. Serious problems resulted from starting production while the aircraft was still under development, a process the Pentagon calls concurrency. The strategy was meant to allow the services to begin flying their F-35s sooner. Instead, F-35s started rolling off the production line with unresolved technical problems, forcing the Pentagon to continually retrofit even newly built jets.
Similar to the Boeing situation where the government abdicated its oversight responsibilities and let Boeing essentially monitor itself with disastrous results, the Pentagon let Lockheed run the show and took Lockheed's word for it that everything was copacetic with the design and production of the airplanes. “I had a sense, after my first 90 days, that the government was not in charge of the program,” said Bogdan, who assumed oversight as the program’s executive officer in December 2012. It seemed “that all of the major decisions, whether they be technical, whether they be schedule, whether they be contractual, were really all being made by Lockheed Martin, and the program office was just kind of watching.”
Since all these planes, both military and commercial, are run by lines of computer code, it is common to blame any malfunction on computer code. The idea that perhaps this is not the right way to design a plane, that computer code shouldn't be relied on to produce a safe and effective plane seems to have eluded them. Boeing executives are trying to convince the public that changing a few lines of computer code will correct the deficiencies in the 737 MAX when the real deficiency is that the plane was not designed from scratch using sound aerodynamic principles. It is a kluge in other words. In 2016, Senator John McCain of Arizona labeled the [F-35] program a “scandal and a tragedy with respect to cost, schedule and performance.”
It's ridiculous to develop a high performance aircraft like the F-35 if the only thing it's tasked to do is to drop a few bombs on ISIS. That could be done with World War II era airplanes. Yet the public goes along with this colossal waste of their taxpayers dollars in order to create a jobs program that keeps the economy humming. That is the true raison d'etre of the military-industrial complex. Soon the Pentagon will declare that the F-35 is obsolete after we've spent a trillion dollars on it in light of the artificial intelligence and 5G technology. China is already developing planes with those capabilities. Then Lockheed and the Pentagon will come up with an even more ambitious plane to develop the world's most technologically advance aircraft given that the F-35 will be now obsolete.
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