The US military's F-35 fighter program, already suffering repeated delays, faces a spate of technical problems that the Pentagon expects will slow the pace of production, officials said Wednesday.
The latest troubling revelations for the Joint Strike Fighter -- the most expensive weapons program in history -- emerged from a leaked internal Pentagon report that outlines an array of problems exposed by flight tests.
The internal report, posted Tuesday on the independent website Project on Government Oversight, listed five engineering problems "where major consequence issues have been identified" but not yet solved.
The weak points included the pilot's helmet mounted display which has performed poorly, a fuel dump system that leaves fuel on the plane's surface, the plane's integrated power system that has raised safety concerns, and the arresting hook landing gear for the aircraft carrier version of the plane. The hook has failed to work properly in test landings on carriers.
Three other engineering issues also carried the potential to turn into major problems, it said, including airframe fatigue and buffeting or vibration.
The report, dubbed a "Quick Look Review" of the F-35 program, said the technical challenges generated "a lack of confidence in the design stability" of the aircraft, which has already started production.
As a result, the review calls for "serious reconsideration of procurement and production planning," it said.
A spokesman for the Joint Strike Fighter program confirmed that managers were looking at scaling back the pace of production to allow time to fix the technical problems that had emerged.
"That's one way to help reduce concurrency (costs) is to slow that (production) down," spokesman Joe DellaVedova told AFP.
But he did not provide details, saying the numbers would depend on the outcome of negotiations with the plane's manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, and the proposed defense budget for 2013.
Pentagon officials use the word "concurrency" to describe the F-35 Lightning II program's approach, which sought to launch manufacturing much earlier and in parallel with test flights.
The assumption was that sophisticated simulation technology would preclude the need for dramatic changes in the plane's design and that production could be scheduled much earlier than in previous aircraft programs.
But the authors of the review said that assumption proved overly optimistic.
Winslow Wheeler, an outspoken skeptic of Pentagon spending and the F-35 project, said the latest technical problems suggested the whole fighter program should be scrapped.
"The new revelations are numerous and significant enough to call into question whether F-35 production should be suspended -- if not terminated -- even in the minds of today's senior managers in the Pentagon," said Wheeler from the Center for Defense Information.
Senator John McCain, speaking last week, called on the government to negotiate tough terms with Lockheed for the next tranche of fighters and expressed disgust with the program's cost overruns and engineering setbacks.
"In a nutshell, the JSF program has been both a scandal and a tragedy," McCain said.
The Joint Strike Fighter is supposed to form the backbone of the future US air fleet and 11 other allied countries have joined the project.
Defense officials have struggled to keep costs under control, with each plane's price tag doubling in real terms over the past decade. The price of each plane is roughly at $113 million in fiscal year 2011 dollars and the program's overall cost has jumped to about $385 billion.
Copyright 2011 AFP American Edition
