Issue 348: Being Prepared

Defence estimates lifetime sustainment costs for complex capabilities at double to two-and-a-half times the cost of acquisition – for the F-35 that amounts to around $43 billion over its three-decade life.

It would obviously like to reduce that cost and that’s now the subject of substantial work by Lockheed Martin, its suppliers, the Joint Program Office in the Pentagon plus US and international F-35 operators.

Australia first committed to the F-35 in June 2002 when Howard government Defence Minister Senator Robert Hill announced we would join the program’s System Design and Development phase.

That effectively settled project AIR 6000 which studied the F-35, Eurofighter, Rafale, Gripen and others for the RAAF’s new air combat capability. It was anticipated the new aircraft would enter service from 2012, replacing F/A-18 Hornets and F-111s.

It didn’t quite work out that way, as is well known. Instead, the first F-35s will be permanently based in Australia from December 2018. The RAAF plans initial operating capability (IOC) in December 2020 and full operating capability (FOC) in 2023.

Head of the JSF Office within the Department of Defence’s Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group (CASG), Air Vice-Marshal Leigh Gordon, said as the F-35 program evolved, Defence started to think harder about Australian sovereign requirements for F-35 support and what could be provided by the joint program – that is, overseas.

“Our thinking on sustainment started to get more significant and deep over the last four or so years,” he said.

“We concluded that aircraft maintenance, repair, overhaul and upgrade (MRO&U) or depot which I prefer to call it, we wanted to have done in Australia. And engine depot we wanted to have done in Australia. ” At the same time, the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) in the Pentagon was building a sustainment framework, settling on a model of regional delivery of sustainment activities.

“They were looking for venues for regional depots and we were very fortunate that the JPO process and our process overlapped and we ended up with the aircraft and engine depots in Australia,” AVM Gordon said.

It was always envisaged that RAAF maintainers would perform routine operational support on the F-35, with industry responsible for deeper maintenance.

AVM Gordon said maintenance should be done by the best placed organisations and there should be substantial crossover between RAAF and industry.

“While we have this view that operational maintenance will be Air Force and depot will be industry, we are actually going to be looking for the ability to flow. Horizontal integration and blended workforce are the terms we use,” he said.

This all presents big opportunities for Australian firms.

In February 2015, the F-35 JPO announced Australia would be the Regional F-35 airframe depot for the South Pacific, with the work centred on BAE Systems Australia’s facility located adjacent to RAAF Williamtown, NSW.

At the same time, Queensland aerospace firm TAE was selected to provide heavy maintenance for the F-35’s Pratt & Whitney F135 engine.

TAE was initially contracted to maintain F-111 engines and now supports F404 and F414 engines for the F/A-18 Hornet and Super Hornet at its facility at RAAF Base Amberley.

Then in November last year, Australian companies were chosen to provide depot level maintenance for a group of 64 F-35 components, including avionics, aircraft structures, electrical and refuelling, the auxiliary power system, hydraulics and pneumatics, landing gear and life support systems.

That’s for all F-35 aircraft in the Pacific region, with work starting in 2025. We missed out on just one component group relating to the ejection seat, which was assigned to South Korea.

In practice this depot work relates to components from F-35s flown by the RAAF, Japan and South Korea. It could also apply to visiting US aircraft, for example US Marine Corps F-35B aircraft training in the Northern Territory.

Should other regional nations buy the F-35 – Singapore is expected to order the jet in coming years – we would get their component work.

Even sooner, from 2021 to 2025, Australia will undertake global repair of three life support components including the F-35’s onboard oxygen generator. Of these first 65 global repair assignments, the UK was assigned 48 and the Netherlands 14.

The announcement of the Asia Pacific repair assignments came after a lobbying visit to the US by Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne.

“This will be a real boon for Australia and proves yet again that our defence industry can equal and in fact beat the best in the world when it comes to advanced manufacturing,” the Minister said at the time.

But it was never inevitable that anything more than basic F-35 support would ever be performed in Australia.

That Australia was chosen over Japan and South Korea to be the F-35 regional maintenance hub is testament to an effective “Team Australia” approach by the Australian Government, Defence Department and defence industry.

“It was a Pacific competition. It wasn’t like Australia was going to get a depot. Then it was a choice within Australia where that depot would be,” says Steve Drury, BAE Systems Australia director of aerospace.

“Something like this has never been done before. It is extremely exciting for us but we definitely understand how large the task is and how important it is to get it right. ” Back in 1993 as the RAAF started looking for a replacement for its ageing Macchi trainers, the government took the then novel step of requiring those bidding to supply aircraft also to bid to provide support for an initial five years.

Drury said BAE Systems won that contract with its Hawk 127 lead-in fighter (LIF), assembled the aircraft, brought them into service then sustained them for the first five years.

“That was all in one upfront costed package, won against others. We pitched 33 aeroplanes to provide the availability they needed and had to back it with the number of repairable items needed, the number of people needed and the maintenance programs required on that particular aircraft,” he said.

For the F-35 that amounts to around $43 billion over its three-decade life.

BAE attributes much of the success in gaining F-35 work to its experience in supporting Hawk.

AVM Leigh Gordon concurs and he should know – he was engineering and subsequently lead-in fighter project manager, overseeing the Hawk introduction to RAAF service.

He said lead-in fighter was one of Defence’s early forays into performance-based contracting. That’s now evolving from material performance indicators, such as aircraft availability and reliability, to measures of the relationship performance.

“In the air domain, where it’s practical, we look to have what we call a rolling wave performance-based contract with an efficiency dividend. We look to partner with an industry partner for an initial period of time and, subject to them performing well and being a good steward and partner of the capability, they will win additional time.

“While it is only a five-year contract at the initial award, it could be a life of type contract depending on their level of performance. In that, the relationship piece is fairly important. ” AVM Gordon said the co-location of RAAF Hawk operations and BAE’s Hawk maintenance facility at Williamtown was “pretty much leading edge. ” “We established a fairly strong partnering relationship way back in the acquisition phase. These sorts of mature relationships are the way that CASG is trying to evolve,” he said.

During the Avalon Airshow, a group of VIPs visited Williamtown to inspect both the RAAF and BAE facilities and came away impressed.

Steve Drury said Hawk maintenance was now conducted through this “rolling wave” with their contract routinely extended.

“If the Commonwealth is not happy they don’t give you an extension, they start to mobilise a team to put together a request for tender (RFT), issue the RFT, gain responses, choose a preferred tenderer, negotiate, allow that team to mobilise,” he said.

“It would be difficult for Defence to go elsewhere but the last thing I want to do is make Defence feel that they do want to go elsewhere. ” Having won this lucrative F-35 work, BAE is very conscious that it can’t now rest easy.

It was never inevitable that anything more than basic F-35 support would ever be performed in Australia.

“The JPO have made it very clear that other countries that missed out should be quite willing to put their hand up and say ‘we want to have a go at that, we don’t think it’s as cheap as it should be’,” he said.

There could be much more. The JPO still has to allocate regional support work for the next batch of components plus spares warehousing.

In the preparations for the bids for the F-35 depot and component MRO&U, Defence challenged industry to come up with a collaborative Team Australia approach to be pitched to the JPO, rather than individual companies going it alone.

BAE Systems Australia F-35 project manager Todd Bardell said one of the key tasks was to gather Australian industry players and work out what was possible.

“We said if we all went independently to try and compete on this we would probably come out with not much,” he said.

“BAE worked with Northrop Grumman Australia and GE Aviation. We worked with Rockwell Collins and with Martin Baker. We also worked with the SMEs to assess who was best placed with those niche skills to come into the team. There was a lot of industry engagement.

“We then communicated closely with the JSF Office to put that package together and put that to the F-35 JPO. And that was well received. ” BAE is the lead for repair of two groups of avionics, supported by GE Systems Australia, Northrop Grumman Australia and Rockwell Collins Australia. Work will also be performed by BAE in Adelaide and by partners in Sydney and Melbourne and possibly Brisbane.

Airframe composites MRO&U will be led by Northrop Grumman, supported by Quickstep which currently produces F-35 composite parts at its facility in Bankstown.

RUAG Australia will perform support work on four component groups, including landing gear and brakes, fuel system elements and pumps.

Bardell said sustaining the F-35 airframe was complex but sustaining components is “complexity times 100”.

“This now involves multiple components, across multiple original equipment manufacturers, across multiple locations with multiple teammates,” he said.

Much work is still ahead.

F-35 maintenance publications haven’t yet reached Australia. For work to start, BAE will also need a range of F-35-specific support equipment.

Both the RAAF and industry need to build up a maintenance workforce. Currently there are 25 RAAF maintainers attending ground school at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, home of the USAF’s first operational F-35 squadron.

They will then transfer to Luke Air Force Base, Arizona for on-the-job experience with F-35 aircraft used to train US and international aircrew. By FOC, the RAAF wants to have 650 trained maintainers.

Defence has already invested heavily in facilities at Williamtown. In August 2015, the federal parliamentary Public Works Committee approved Phase Two of the Williamtown RAAF Base upgrade worth $274 million. Stage one redevelopment of the base was completed in 2004 and included facilities for the Wedgetail airborne early warning and control aircraft.

AVM Gordon said one very important building had been completed, housing the offboard information systems centre, or OBISC, to use the inevitable defence acronym.

That will connect Defence’s IT systems, including the Defence Restricted Network and Defence Secret Network with the F-35 Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS), the enormously complex IT system designed to link each individual F-35 with maintainers and the global support system.

ALIS remains a work in progress. The US Director of Operational Test and Evaluation in the Pentagon says ALIS experiences continuing delays and shortfalls and version 3. 0 may not be delivered before mid-2018.

AVM Gordon said ALIS now provided functionality but with a lot of intervention.

“Where things could be autonomic, we are having to do some manual transfers. With each successive patch, it certainly gets better. It’s a more complex system in some ways than the aeroplane but it has phenomenal potential, just like the aeroplane, in terms of being a maintenance aid,” he said.

From an Australian perspective, AVM Gordon says the biggest risk is integrating the F-35 and its systems such as ALIS into Defence’s systems.

Hence, mitigating this risk by standing up OBISC well in advance of the aircraft’s actual arrival was a really smart decision, he said. Another challenge for the RAAF is creating the capability to generate mission data files, providing current information including the latest intelligence for a particular mission. Each pilot carries this data out to the aircraft on an electronic ‘brick’ at the start of each flight.

Australia, Canada and the UK are developing their own planning lab right next door to the US Air Force facility at Eglin.

AVM Gordon says the expectation is that by IOC, the RAAF will be able to generate its own mission data files.

Then there’s the all-important low observable (LO) coatings, among the most secret and closely guarded of the F-35’s advanced technologies.

BAE Systems Australia F-35 program director Andrew Gresham says the US stipulates that maintenance of these coatings will be a sovereign activity, with a direct contract between the JPO and the Australian government and its agent, the RAAF.

“That is central to the capability of the aircraft. We have had engagements with maintenance personnel who apply low observable coating on the F-35. Our initial understanding is that it’s a sensitive process,” he said.

AVM Gordon said Defence wanted this maintenance to be done in Australia.

“That doesn’t mean that it has to be done by the military. We are looking for industry to have some capabilities in this area and we are working through the process of understanding where those boundaries will be,” he said.

For maintainers, whether RAAF or defence industry, almost any activity on an F-35 will involve some interaction with the LO coating. On the plus side, the F-35’s LO coating is regarded as substantially more maintainable than what was on older stealth aircraft such as the F-22.

For industry, dealing with LO coatings is just one of the F-35 features significantly different to older aircraft.

Gresham says the F-35 has far more sophisticated avionics than older aircraft.

On classic Hornet, the workforce was split with around 40 per cent working on mechanical systems, 40 per cent on structures and 20 per cent on avionics. For the F-35, the complex electronics will require far more skilled workers.

Another area of significant difference is that the F-35 has more composites.

“It has a composite skin. That will require enhanced skill-sets for non-destructive testing, inspection, removal and reinstallation and repair. That could be on the aircraft or back at Quickstep which manufacture composite panels for the aircraft,” he said.

With FOC still more than five years away, the RAAF stands to benefit substantially from the experience of others.

The US Marine Corps declared initial operational capability in 2015 and the US Air Force last year. Next is expected to be the Israeli Air Force around December. Eight countries are now flying the F-35, with more expected to declare IOC in the next five years.

Already more than 200 aircraft are flying, with 400 pilots and 4,000 maintainers trained. F-35s have accumulated more than 80,000 flying hours. Currently 140 aircraft are now being assembled in Fort Worth as well as in Japan and Italy.

Lockheed Martin’s F-35 project director Jeff Babione, who visited the Avalon Airshow, said Lockheed and other primes have been working hard to reduce the acquisition cost of the F-35 and also the cost of ownership.

“We understand the unit price of the airplane is extremely important. The operating costs are just as important. About two-thirds of the total ownership cost is actually operating the airplane over its 30-year lifetime,” he said.

Lockheed, BAE and Northrop Grumman are already investing in projects to reduce operating costs and aim to cut the overall sustainment bill by US$1 billion in five years from 2018.

One local example is the engine trailer constructed by Marand Precision Engineering in Melbourne. Babione termed this an “engineering masterpiece” and a “work of art” designed for engine replacement anywhere from an airfield hangar to a carrier in sea state five.

But most F-35 operators, who will be flying the F-35A conventional takeoff and landing variant, won’t ever need to replace an engine at sea. That includes the RAAF.

So the company proposed a lower cost simpler trailer solely for use on land. Marand and Lockheed are now finalising the design. For Marand, the attraction is that it will likely sell more trailers.

“For an investment of about US$4 million in non-recurring engineering effort, we are going to reduce what we think to be the cost to buy those trailers by as much as US$50 million,” he said.

Babione said the F-35 team was starting to generate many more such cost-saving ideas.

“We are going out to the bases, Luke and others, talking to the maintainers,” he said.

“We are really just now at the very beginning of doing these cost savings ideas but it has great potential. ” Babione said Australia was well-placed for F-35 sustainment: “The companies we talked to… are well-positioned, led by BAE, to do some of that work,” he said.

There are further opportunities for companies to bid for the next round of component repair and warehousing.

“The opportunity is out there. Where those sources of repair end up has yet to play out. The Joint Program Office make an assessment along with the US Government in terms of how that is going to be allocated. Lockheed has a role in providing information,” Babione said.

Both of Australia’s F-35 aircraft already require certain upgrade work to address concurrency issues – problems identified in flight testing, incorporated into newly built aircraft but which need to be fixed on older aircraft.

AVM Gordon said there was a difference between Lot Six aircraft, which includes Australia’s first two F-35As, and Lot 10 aircraft, although it was not a huge difference.

“Some of the modifications will be incorporated in the US. We are thinking about whether it makes sense to incorporate some of the modifications in Australia,” he said.

One particular modification will be performed in the US, to remediate a well-publicised issue which restricted F-35s flying too close to thunderstorms.

The mod installs a system to introduce an inert gas into the fuel tank to eliminate the small risk that lightning could have ignited fuel vapour.

That’s not a difficult upgrade but it is invasive and time consuming.

“We’re planning on the lightning modification taking four months to implement, including a number of other modifications to the aircraft,” he said. Eighty-two years ago, on October 21 1934, a single-engine monoplane took off from Brisbane’s Archerfield Aerodrome at the start of the very first west to east crossing of the Pacific Ocean.

That aircraft was a Lockheed Altair piloted by Charles Kingsford Smith and Gordon Taylor, who completed the flight in 52 flying hours over 15 days.

Lockheed Martin points to the historical similarities of this flight with a more recent trans-Pacific crossing, that of the RAAF’s first two F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters which visited Australia for the Avalon Airshow.

This was the first F-35 trans-Pacific flight and the first time the F-35 has crossed the equator. Another connection, both the Altair and F-35 are powered by a single Pratt & Whitney engine, although many generations apart.

Flown by the RAAF’s first two qualified F-35 pilots, Wing Commander Andrew Jackson and Squadron Leader David Bell, aircraft A35-001 and A35-002 flew from Luke Air Force Base, Arizona to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii and Anderson Air Force Base, Guam, and finally to RAAF Amberley.

They were refuelled around every half hour by a RAAF KC-30 tanker.

On Friday March 3, they made their first public appearance, landing at Avalon before a wowed crowd and being welcomed by the Prime Minister.

Then on March 8, they returned the way they came. Their flight covered more than 16,000 kilometres and went off without incident.

That could not be said for Kingsford Smith and Taylor who twice came perilously close to disaster.

Taking off from a beach on Fiji, the fully fuelled Altair – named Lady Southern Cross – was hit by a crosswind and almost ended in the surf. She was saved by Kingsford Smith’s flying skill.

Then on the long leg to Hawaii, Kingsford Smith was again able to escape disaster after the aircraft went into a spin in a tropical storm and dropped more than 9,000ft.

Lockheed Martin Australia chief executive Vince Di Pietro – who has a model of the Lady Southern Cross in his Canberra office – points to this epic flight as the start of the long association between Lockheed and Australia.

During World War 2, the RAAF flew a large number of Lockheed Hudson bombers and even a small number of Lockheed P-38 Lightnings, after which the F-35 Lightning II was named.

The RAAF was the first international customer for Lockheed’s new C-130 Hercules transport aircraft, with the first arriving in 1958. The C-130 has remained part of the RAAF fleet ever since.

Civil airlines have operated Lockheed Constellations and Electras. The Royal Australian Navy now operates Lockheed’s MH-6OR Romeo helicopter.

Di Pietro says under project AIR 5428, Lockheed Martin will support all initial Defence pilot training at Sale, Victoria and Pearce, WA.

“We are going to be engaged very fully in training every single pilot in the Army, Navy and Air Force,” he said.

From this initial training pilots will then transition to fast jets, transport or rotary wing.

“It is not an insignificant footprint. Have we been very effective at blowing our trumpet – probably not. Most people probably don’t appreciate how deeply we are involved,” he said.

Di Pietro said the F-35’s successful flight across the Pacific then back with nil unserviceability issues showed this was far from an experimental aircraft, as some have suggested.

“That is not even remotely developmental. That shows to me a maturity of design which is mind numbingly thorough,” he said.