F/A-22 Flight Testing “May be Delayed”
Lockheed Martin Corp.’s $71 billion F/A-22 fighter jet program may not be ready for the next phase of its testing, U.S. Air Force Secretary James Roche said Wednesday, adding to storm clouds.
“I think it’s iffy,” he said in reply to a question about whether a scheduled meeting next week of top Pentagon acquisition officials should approve entry into the main stage of operational testing and evaluation.
Roche acknowledged a delay could boost vulnerability to budget cuts, just weeks after the Army killed the Comanche, a multi-billion dollar helicopter development program also plagued by cost overruns and technical glitches.
By law, operational testing of a weapons system must be accomplished before the Pentagon can order full-rate production rather than the current, low-rate initial output.
“I’d rather do it right,” Roche told a defense writers’ forum, referring to results, not preconceived timelines. “And if people want to come and attack it, attack it.”
In the current phase of testing, the aircraft’s “sortie generation rate was not good,” he said, referring to how long it takes to fly again after a test mission.
Significant progress has been made in fixing software instabilities that dogged the so-called Raptor, the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester, Thomas Christie, said in his annual report in January.
But several software headaches remain “as well as numerous deficiencies in functionality that will potentially affect mission performance,” Christie wrote at the time.
The General Accounting Office, a congressional watchdog body, recommended in a report Monday the Pentagon “complete a new business case that justifies the continued need for the F/A-22 and determines the number of F/A-22 aircraft needed” given capabilities, alternatives and spending constraints.
Critics call the F/A-22 a Cold War relic initially designed for air-to-air combat with Soviet MiGs. The program has come under new scrutiny by the White House Office of Management and Budget, which ordered a study of it along with the now-cancelled Comanche, built by Boeing Co. and United Technologies Corp.’s Sikorsky unit.
Roche said problems of the type facing the F/A-22 were normal. He cited the Joint Strike Fighter, another Lockheed tactical fighter program, as “already in trouble” two years into its development.
Although Roche did not elaborate on what he meant by JSF troubles, his spokesman, Lt. Col. William Nichols, discounted them as “normal kinks…because it’s an airplane and a complicated system.”
A spokesman for Lockheed’s F/A-22 program, Greg Caires, said some valves and pumps used in other aircraft had proved to be less robust than expected when subjected to the Raptor’s greater stresses.
On the other hand, “Raptor-specific parts are showing a tremendous reliability,” he said.
Source: Reuters (17th March 2004)
Steve Rush ~ Touchdown-News
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