November 30, 2020 | International, Aerospace
By: Sebastian Sprenger and Valerie Insinna
COLOGNE, Germany, and WASHINGTON — Four aircraft makers have submitted final offers for Switzerland's $6.5 billion aircraft program, with Airbus and Lockheed Martin touting different approaches to assembling their planes locally.
Nov. 18 was the deadline for the quartet of hopeful vendors, which also includes Boeing and Dassault, to deliver their vision — and price — for one of the largest procurement programs in Europe.
Switzerland is looking for somewhere between 36 and 40 new aircraft to police the country's airspace. The degree of local industry participation is shaping up to be a major factor for the famously independence-minded Swiss.
Airbus got an assist from four Eurofighter operators — Germany, Spain, Italy and the U.K. — who sent their ambassadors in Switzerland to a Nov. 19 news conference to talk up the prospect of a grander industrial and political partnership that would follow a Eurofighter pick.
The Swiss are expected to make a decision in early summer 2021, following a referendum vote this September that narrowly greenlighted the budget.
The Airbus offer includes final assembly of all aircraft by way of a partner company in Switzerland, the details of which the company plans to announce in December.
Michael Flügger, Germany's ambassador in Switzerland, touted the possibility of Eurofighter-based airspace-patrol cooperation along the Italy-Switzerland-Germany axis. In addition, he said, Switzerland joining the airplane's user club would mean the country can “export” training flight noise to remote areas in the other partner countries.
Franz Posch, who heads the Airbus campaign in Switzerland, told reporters that the company's plan to locally assemble all 40 of the notional aircraft would “more than fulfill” the offset requirements established by the Swiss government.
Lockheed Martin, with its F-35, also has high hopes for the Swiss competition, hoping to broaden the plane's user base in Europe. The company's offer includes a basic program of 36 jets, with options for an additional four aircraft, Mike Kelley, who leads the company's F-35 efforts in Switzerland, said during a Nov. 19 roundtable with reporters.
While Switzerland would be able to purchase parts through the spares pool shared by all F-35 operators, the offer also contains a six-month deployed spares package — a separate pot of parts that would be managed by the Swiss government, which was necessary to meet Swiss autonomy requirements.
To meet requirements for industrial participation, Switzerland would have the opportunity to domestically produce about 400 canopies and transparencies for F-35 aircraft, and Lockheed would establish a European hub for the maintenance, repair and overhaul of F 35 canopies and transparencies in Switzerland. In addition, the country would take on certain F-35 engine and airframe sustainment projects focused on maintaining the Swiss Air Force's operational autonomy, Kelley said.
Lockheed also plans to partner with Swiss industry to create a cyber center of excellence, which would prototype a unique data network for Switzerland and build a test bed that would allow Swiss companies to test cyber capabilities in a secure environment.
On top of those efforts, Lockheed is offering one last industrial participation opportunity to Switzerland. For an additional cost, Switzerland will be able to conduct the final assembly of four F-35 aircraft at existing RUAG facilities in Emmen, allowing the Swiss technicians that currently work on the country's aging Hornet fleet to build a deeper knowledge of the aircraft's design.
That option would add a “significant cost” to the total program, Kelley said, but could allow for overall savings throughout the life cycle of the program.
Boeing, meanwhile, has positioned its offer of an F-18 Super Hornet fleet as a logical extension of Switzerland's existing F-18 infrastructure. “As an F/A-18 operator, Switzerland will have the option to reuse up to 60 percent of existing physical and intellectual infrastructure, making the transition to a Super Hornet easier and more cost effective over the life of the aircraft,” the company said in a statement.
The aircraft offer, the statement added, would “easily fit” within Switzerland's current F-18 operating budget.
The reference to cost comes after Swiss officials stressed that the fighter portion of the Air 2030 air defense modernization program includes a cost ceiling of 6 billion Swiss francs (U.S. $6.6 billion), with with an eye on potential price reductions along the way.
“Currently, Boeing is working with more than 100 current and new partners across Switzerland to identify the right opportunities for its New Fighter Aircraft industry plan,” the company said.
France's Dassault, with its offer of the Rafale, is the only vendor keeping its cards close to its chest. Citing a commitment to confidentiality, a spokeswoman told Defense News the company had no plans to characterize its offer nor the “nature of the relationship” between the Swiss and French governments to that end.
December 7, 2021 | International, C4ISR, Security
NATO will engage even more closely with partners that share our values and interests, including countries, organizations, private companies and academic institutions. Preserving peace, the global rules and our democratic way of life is a collective effort.
September 27, 2022 | International, Aerospace
"The odds are against it happening" by 2030, John Venable of the Heritage Foundation said. "In the last 25 or 30 years, nothing's come in on time.'
March 16, 2020 | International, Aerospace
By Steve Trimble Pratt & Whitney's F100 (pictured) is designed to be interchangeable with GE Aviation's F110 as the engine for the Boeing F-15 fleet. A jet engine maker is pressuring the U.S. Defense Department to scrap a plan to award a sole-source contract to a rival for a fleet of new fighters and investigate the opportunity for performance and cost improvements yielded by a competitive selection process. If that narrative sounds familiar, it is because it echoes a role GE Aviation played for more than 40 years, which included a successful bid in the 1980s to launch the “Great Engine War” over the F-15 and F-16 fleets and a failed campaign that ended almost a decade ago to establish the F136 as the alternate engine for the F-35. This time, however, the roles are reversed. Pratt & Whitney, which waged fierce lobbying campaigns against competitive engine policies for the F-15, F-16 and F-35, has switched sides in the debate. In response to the U.S. Air Force's decision to field the F-15EX into production powered solely by GE F110 engines, Pratt has filed two protests with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which is scheduled to render judgments on both cases by early July. The Air Force sided with GE during the Great Engine War in 1984. Seeking to lower costs and motivate Pratt to resolve stall-stagnation problems with the original F100, the Air Force decided that year to split the engine contract for the F-15 and F-16 between GE's F110 and Pratt's F100. Thirty-six years later, the Air Force now worries about the schedule impact if the GAO sustains either or both of Pratt's protests of the F-15EX engine. Service officials decided to acquire the F-15EX after concluding the F-15C/Ds were too costly to sustain and because it would take too long for the Pratt F135-powered F-35A to replace all of them. Pratt's protests threaten to disrupt that schedule and erode the Air Force's original business case for the F-15EX. “If we have to do an engine competition, it will add time—2-3 years,” said Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on March 10. Only a decade ago, Pratt welcomed a vote by Congress in 2010 to cancel funding for the F-35 program's alternate engine, along with a decision by GE and Rolls-Royce a year later to abandon a plan to self-fund the certification of the F136. But Pratt now embraces the potential benefits of an engine competition for the F-15EX. “Our government supports competition at all levels, and we're interested in providing the F100 as a competitive alternative,” Pratt Military Engines President Matthew Bromberg told Aviation Week. “If we're not competitive in terms of capability, schedule [and] price, I get it. But after the U.S. government spent all this money creating two engines for the F-15 and F-16 platforms, why would it then not compete a 450-engine program?” Asked if the existing F100 would require additional development to meet the Air Force's requirements for the F-15EX, Bromberg replied that he cannot answer that question in the absence of a competitive process that allows Pratt access to the specifications. He also noted that the F100 exclusively powers the Air Force's existing fleet of F-15Es. The F100 and F110 were designed to fit interchangeably in the F-15, although the heavily modified Saudi Arabian F-15SA and the Qatari F-15QA from which the F-15EX was derived are exclusively powered by GE's engine. The GAO does not release complaints filed by protesters up front, but it does release the full text of decisions. It is not clear why Pratt filed two separate protests on the sole-source decision for the GE engine on the F-15EX, but Bromberg advised not reading too much into it. “I'd like to obviously be able to discuss them, but I can't because it's a legal process,” Bromberg said. “I would really view them as a single protest on a single procurement action, and that is a lack of competition.” https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/aircraft-propulsion/possible-new-engine-war-recasts-pratt-champion-competition