A New Era?

The fourth nation in the world to take delivery of a fifth generation aircraft. AIRMSHL BROWN

tangible effect to Australia’s plans to acquire 72 of the fifth generation jets.

“Today represents a very significant day for the Royal Australian Air Force as we step down as the fourth nation in the world to take delivery of a fifth generation aircraft, and that enables the transition of the Australian Defence Force into a fifth generation defence force,” Chief of Air Force Air Marshal Geoff Brown told the ceremony’s audience of dignitaries, Lockheed Martin staff and media.

“The F-35 is perhaps the greatest opportunity for evolutionary change the RAAF has been presented. We’re introducing into service a revolutionary capability, and our evolution as a force must align with the opportunities this offers us. ” Australia’s first two F-35s – AU-1 and AU-2 (which was previewed to media the day before the rollout ceremony) have both completed final assembly and painting and are due to fly in the November timeframe.

As such Australia’s plans to replace the RAAF’s current ‘classic’ Hornets with the F-35 are becoming a long-anticipated reality.

“Like any revolutionary capability its potential to generate effects beyond the mainstream will have far reaching impacts in any future application,” CAF said.

But realising those far reaching impacts will take time. The first two RAAF jets will first be delivered to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona where from early 2015 they will operate as part of the US Air Force’s F-35 training pool. And subsequent F-35 deliveries won’t follow until 2017, continuing through until 2022, while the first F-35s won’t arrive in Australia until late 2018 or early 2019, when the RAAF begins its own operational test & evaluation process.

It is a long and deliberate process, in part the result of program delays and in part due to Australia’s cautious wait-and-see approach to ordering the aeroplane. So it will be a 20+ year process from signing on as a Joint Strike Fighter program partner in 2002 to the aircraft achieving full operational capability with the RAAF in 2023.

And that assumes current schedules hold. Since its rebaselining in 2010 the F-35 program has to date been tracking to schedule, but the aircraft’s three-week grounding from late June due to an engine fire – which has eaten up much of the contingency reserve for this year’s planned flight test schedule (and led to the cancellation of the F-35’s international debut at the RIAT and Farnborough airshows in the UK) – illustrates that the jet may be maturing, but is not yet mature.

Speaking at AU-1’s rollout event, Frank Kendall, Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, reflected on the aircraft’s complexity, and its delays.

“Why is the F-35 taking so long and costing so much?” Kendall recalled being asked by then US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta a few years ago.

“My answer was one word,” Kendall told the AU-1 ceremony’s 300-strong audience. “Complexity. ” Kendall continued: “Millions of lines of code, an incredibly integrated design that brings together stealth, a number of characteristics, very advanced sensors, advanced radars, . . . incredibly capable electronic warfare capability, integration of weapons and integration across the force of multiple aircraft and multiple sensors to work together as a team. ” “You’re talking about something that no one has ever done before, which will put us all a decade or more ahead of anybody else out there. ” It was the F-35’s capabilities, Kendall said, that had seen the F-35’s partner services and nations keep faith in the program. “That’s why we’re all still together. ” Certainly Australia’s faith in the program has been firm.

“Throughout the ups and downs that are part of any ground breaking technology Australia has remained a steadfast partner, confident in this technology and steadfast in bringing its value to the Australian Defence Force,” Lockheed Martin president and CEO Marillyn Hewson said in her remarks during the rollout ceremony.

For its part, the RAAF’s concerns around risk for the F-35 program lie more with introducing the aircraft into service.

“I’m just not fundamentally worried about the jet,” AIRMSHL Brown told Australian media after the rollout event. “The biggest task we’ve got is actually the transition, and when I talk to my team the thing that I keep emphasising is the worst thing we can do is bring this thing in and use it like an F-18. We’ve got to hit the ground running with new tactics and new procedures to really get the best out of it. ”That process will be helped by the three-year gap between the first two and subsequent deliveries of the F-35, plus exposure to the capabilities of fifth generation fighters thanks to an F-22 exchange pilot position with the US Air Force, and building on the RAAF’s own experience of operating the Super Hornet, with its advanced AESA radar.

“Having watched the Mirage to F-18 transition, we’re very focused on the fact that we don’t do this the same way, and that we maximise the capabilities of the jet. You’ve got to take a different mindset, you’ve got a different piece of equipment with

That’s why we’re all still together. FRANK KENDALL

very different capabilities. ” Maintenance and logistics are also “where the big challenges are now”, CAF continued.

“The biggest risk is making sure we get the logistics right, and that’s what we are concentrating on now. ” Risk mitigation includes setting up the F-35’s complex Autonomic Logistics Information System – ALIS – in Australia well before the first RAAF F-35s arrive in-country.

“We’re actually bringing an ALIS system across to Australia shortly so that we can do a lot of the integration,” CAF explained. “ALIS will be connected up to our network to see what the issues are there. ” That means, CAF continued, that: “Before we bring it [the F-35] back to Australia we will have had three or four years of looking at how the training is going, so unlike with the F-18 where we brought it back and then had to develop our own training, I think this is a better way to do it, and with less risk on the logistics side. “So we get our trained crews and maintainers online, having the aeroplane in the States before we bring it back to Australia. ” The longer-term sustainment model for the F-35 in Australia is still to be worked through, with Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems (one of two principal subcontractors on the program, along with Northrop Grumman) likely to compete for Australian in-country F-35 sustainment.

In his speech at the ceremony Finance Minister Senator Mathias Cormann (representing Defence Minister Senator David Johnston who remained in Australia to deal with MH17 issues) highlighted not only the participation by Australian industry in the F-35 program to date, but also the opportunity for Australia to host an F-35 regional support centre.

“As the only regional Asia Pacific JSF partner nation we hope and anticipate that Australian industry will be frontrunners for opportunities for both productionand support, including hosting in Australia the F-35 regional support capabilities needed to support the wider F-35 fleet in the Asia Pacific,” Senator Cormann noted.

“With the commitment and support of Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney, a steady F-35 production ramp-up, and a continuing favourable Australian dollar, I expect Australian industry [will] do very well on the F-35 program over many years. Some 30 Australian companies have

You’ve got to take a different mindset. . . AIRMSHL BROWN

been directly involved in the F-35 program to date, and more than $412 million in production orders have been won with only about three per cent of aircraft production completed to date. ” But with the F-35 program so big, and the value of industrial and sustainment work so vast, Australia faces strong competition for these opportunities. Japan, for example, while not an F-35 partner nation is establishing an F-35 FACO – Final Assembly and Check Out – facility at Nagoya to build 38 of its planned 42 F-35A jets. So Nagoya might make sense as the future F-35 regional support centre for the aircraft.

But for now that is in the future, and AU-1’s rollout was a time to mark the biggest milestone to date in introducing the aircraft into Australian service.

Remarked Orlando Carvalho, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, “the F-35 is very real and so is confidence in the program. ”