May 14, 2020 | International, Aerospace
By: Valerie Insinna
WASHINGTON — Lockheed Martin's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is on the verge of full-rate production, with a decision slated for early 2021. But a congressional watchdog group is concerned that as the company ramps up F-35 production, its suppliers are falling behind.
And those supply chain problems could get even worse as Turkish defense manufacturers are pushed out of the program, the Government Accountability Office said in a May 12 report.
According to the GAO, the number of F-35 parts delivered late skyrocketed from less than 2,000 in August 2017 to upward of 10,000 in July 2019.
The number of parts shortages per month also climbed from 875 in July 2018 to more than 8,000 in July 2019. More than 60 percent of that sum was concentrated among 20 suppliers, it said.
“To mitigate late deliveries and parts shortages — and deliver more aircraft on time — the airframe contractor has utilized methods such as reconfiguring the assembly line and moving planned work between different stations along the assembly line,” the GAO said.
“According to the program office, such steps can cause production to be less efficient, which, in turn, can increase the number of labor hours necessary to build each aircraft,” which then drives up cost, the GAO added.
Those problems could be compounded by Turkey's expulsion from the F-35 program, which was announced last year after the country moved forward with buying the Russian S-400 air defense system. Although Turkey financially contributed to the development of the F-35 as a partner in the program, the U.S. Defense Department has maintained that Turkey cannot buy or operate the F-35 until it gives up the S-400.
The Pentagon has also taken action to begin stripping Turkish industry from the aircraft's supply chain, a process that involves finding new companies to make 1,005 parts, some of which are sole-sourced by Turkish companies.
Ellen Lord, the Pentagon's undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, had hoped to stop contracting with Turkish suppliers by March 2020, but in January she said that some contracts would extend through the year, according to Defense One.
While the Defense Department has found new suppliers to manufacture the parts currently made in Turkey, it is uncertain whether the price of those components will be more expensive. Furthermore, as of December 2019, the new production rates for 15 components were lagging behind that of the legacy Turkish producers.
“According to program officials, some of these new parts suppliers will not be producing at the rate required until next year, as roughly 10 percent are new to the F-35 program,” the GAO said.
“Airframe contractor representatives stated it would take over a year to stand up these new suppliers, with lead times dependent on several factors, such as part complexity, quantity, and the supplier's production maturity. In addition, these new suppliers are required to go through qualification and testing to ensure the design integrity for their parts.”
The F-35 Joint Program Office disagreed with the GAO's recommendation to provide certain information to Congress ahead of the full-rate production decision, including an evaluation of production risks and a readiness assessment of the suppliers that are replacing Turkish companies.
In its statement, the JPO said it is already providing an acceptable number of updates on the program's readiness for full-rate production.
Hard times for the F-35's engine supplier
Not all F-35 production trends reported by the GAO were bad for the aircraft. Since 2016, Lockheed has made progress in delivering a greater proportion of F-35s on schedule, with 117 of 134 F-35s delivered on time in 2019.
However, one of the biggest subsystems of the F-35 — the F135 engine produced by Pratt & Whitney — drifted in the opposite direction, with a whopping 91 percent of engines delivered behind schedule.
At one point in 2019, Pratt & Whitney stopped deliveries of the F135 for an unspecified period due to test failures, which also contributed to the reduction of on-time deliveries.
According to the Defense Contracts Management Agency, “there have been 18 engine test failures in 2019, which is eight more than in 2018, each requiring disassembly and rework,” the GAO wrote. “To address this issue, the engine contractor has developed new tooling for the assembly line and has established a team to identify characteristics leading to the test failures. Plans are also in place for additional training for employees.”
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May 8, 2019 | International, Aerospace
by Sandra Erwin Airbus is ramping up satellite production in Florida and hopes to attract Pentagon buyers. WASHINGTON — The first project of the newly created Space Development Agency will be to design a large constellation of commercially produced satellites in low Earth orbit to serve as a communications layer and take over military space missions ranging from missile tracking to navigation. Airbus is preparing to start cranking out 32 satellites every three weeks for the broadband venture OneWeb. It built an assembly line on Florida's Space Coast to manufacture up to 648 satellites for OneWeb but also hopes to ramp production to fill orders for the Defense Department, intelligence community and other U.S. government buyers, Nicolas Chamussy, the outgoing head of Airbus Space Systems told SpaceNews on Monday at the Satellite 2019 conference. The company received a $2.9 million contract last fall from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to produce satellite buses for DARPA's Blackjack program, an experiment intended to show the military utility of LEO constellations and mesh networks. DARPA will marry up commercial satellite buses with military sensors and payloads. Former DARPA official Fred Kennedy conceived the Blackjack project and is now head of the Space Development Agency. He said the SDA will tap into the commercial industry's mass satellite production capabilities in order to build a military constellation in LEO. Airbus' main satellite manufacturing plant is in Toulouse, France. It now has U.S.-based design teams staffed with U.S. citizens as well as the Florida production facility, Chamussy said. “It's an opportunity for the U.S. government” to take advantage of these capabilities, he said. The U.S. plant only builds commercial satellites but it could be expanded to produce classified spacecraft, he said. The contract with DARPA has been valuable to Airbus to learn about U.S. defense programs and as a stepping stone to possibly other projects, Chamussy said. “With DARPA, we are learning how to work together, we are trying to understand if our platform is a valuable asset for the U.S. government.” The company is focused now on making satellites and installing OneWeb payloads, but “we can install whatever you want,” he said. For the military, the same satellites could carry positioning, navigation and timing (PNT), electronic warfare, Earth observation or weather payloads. “This is the beauty of have a design team and dedicated facility in U.S.,” said Chamussy. Airbus is hoping to be chosen as the satellite supplier to Canadian satellite operator Telesat, which also received a DARPA Blackjack contract to study the use of commercial buses in LEO-based military systems. Airbus is competing against a Maxar Technologies-Thales Alenia Space team for a contract worth an estimated $3 billion to build Telesat's megaconstellation. Chamussy told reporters at a news conference on Monday that the company expects to submit a proposal in the coming months. “We are still waiting for the request for proposals,” he said. Chamussy insisted that the Telesat concept is very different than OneWeb because the Canadian operator is asking for a full “end to end” system that includes not just the satellites but also ground systems and managed services. Airbus announced last month that Chamussy will be stepping down as executive vice president of Airbus Space Systems under Airbus Defence and Space. He will be replaced by Airbus Defence and Space executive Jean-Marc Nasr. Chamussy declined to comment on whether he will stay at Airbus or in what capacity. https://spacenews.com/airbus-eyes-opportunities-in-future-u-s-military-leo-constellations/