Los Angeles Register September 03, 2014

Unfinished F-35 puts test pilots in hot seat

By William D`Urso

Hovering above the landing strip at Edwards Air Force Base, Colonel Mark Massaro could feel the rudder in his F-35 Lightning II lock up. Yellow words splashing across a 35-inch, touch-sensitive screen told him the situation was bad, but not dire.

That message was reinforced by the engineers from nearby Ridley Mission Control, whose voices crackled through Massaro's $380,000, custom-fit helmet. The test pilot eased his F-35 to the ground.

Massaro, call sign Kelvin, is one of the point men on the Pentagon's effort to wrestle its $400 billion problem plane into shape.

When Lockheed Martin won the F-35 contract in 2001, the plan was to replace much of the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps attack-jet fleet with a plane that would be all but impossible to see on radar and equally capable of dropping bombs or shooting down other planes.

One model of the F-35 would take off and land vertically. Its advanced computers would take the guesswork out of flying.

But in a controversial move designed to cut costs, the plane began production before its design was set or test flights were complete.

That makes the testing program, which Lockheed claims is about 65 percent complete, all the more critical. As problems are discovered or software tweaked, changes have to be made on the fly, so to speak, to all jets that have rolled off the assembly line – more than 100 so far.

To ratchet up the pressure even further, nations such as South Korea and Australia also are counting on the F-35 to replace the proven and far less expensive F-16 Fighting Falcon.

'We're doing all of it at once: We're still designing the airplane, we're testing the airplane, we're still building the airplane, we're fielding the airplane ... and eventually, we're going to build a global support posture over the next four years that covers the globe," Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher C. Bogdan, the F-35 Program Executive Officer, told about 200 Pentagon and defense industry officials at the National Press Club in downtown Washington on Wednesday.

The program has been plagued by a series of costly delays and setbacks. The latest and most embarrassing came in July, when a fire in a Pratt & Whitney engine forced the Pentagon to ground the entire F-35 fleet. That forced the cancellation of the F-35's planned worldwide debut at the Farnborough Air Show in London.

Bogdan said the Air Force has not come to a conclusion as to the cause of the engine fire.

The grounding also delayed testing of critical flight software that has to pass muster before the jet can be combat-ready. It's estimated that software will eventually require more than 24 million lines of coding.

"I'll be the first to tell you, technically, the software is the highest-risk element of this program," Bogdan said. He said the Pentagon "built some margin" into the program for such delays.

The first F-35s are supposed to be operational in a year. Over the next 25 years, more than 3,100 of the jets will be built.

"By the end of this decade, there are only going to be two types of planes in the sky: stealth fighters and targets," says John Pike, director of defense website Globalsecurity.org.

The Navy, Air Force and Marines are to each have a version designed for a different mission. The Marines will get one with vertical takeoff and landing capability, while the Navy's version will have folding wings and the ability to land on aircraft carriers.

Critics say the F-35's biggest problem is just that – it was designed to do too many things.

"This is a terribly designed airplane for anybody who doesn't want to go up and down or straight," says Pierre Sprey, formerly one of Robert McNamara's 1960s Pentagon "Whiz Kids." He helped design stalwarts such as the F-16 and A-10 Warthog.

He says the F-35 has tremendous "drag" or air resistance. "The Air Force wanted an F-16 replacement, and what it got was a fat, draggy pig."

Sprey says he expects the average cost of the plane to rise to $200 million, eclipsing its original estimate of $30 million to $35 million. Rising costs could force smaller partner nations, such as South Korea, to drop out.

The test flights at Edwards, about 100 miles northeast of Los Angeles, are expected to continue through 2016.

Edwards hangars have been home to some of the most famous U.S. test programs. The sound barrier was first broken here in 1947 by Chuck Yeager in the Bell X-1. Today, about 130 test programs are conducted at any one time.

Only 12 pilots at Edwards are certified to test fly the F-35 – eight from the U.S. military, three from Lockheed, and one from the Department of Defense.

The F-35 must go through 56,000 tests, covering everything from avionics and night vision to launching weapons at supersonic speeds.

Part of the test pilot's job is to adjust on the fly to constant changes in the plane and its equipment. On one recent afternoon, Maj. Logan Lamping slipped on his state-of-the-art helmet to find that he had new ear cups. Lamping had mentioned in a post-flight report that the previous cups didn't fit the specs in the contract.

Lamping typically flies the plane three days a week. Since he is also certified to fly the F-16, he'll often take that plane up in combat exercises with the F-35.

A test flight may focus on identifying bugs in a particular piece of equipment, or it may have a broader mission – how the F-35 handles, say, when outnumbered by two, three, or four enemy fighters.

Lamping says the critics are wrong about the F-35's performance.

"I will take this plane any day of the week and twice on Sunday compared to anything else we have in the inventory," he says. "You can take someone with very minimal experience in a fighter, stick them in this airplane and have no problems out the door."

Thanks to its advanced technology, he says, the jet is actually simpler to operate than its predecessors.

"Inside an F-16, there are dozens of switches," Lamping says. "The F-35 maybe has seven or eight."

The test process relies heavily on input from the plane's many sensors and a river of data generated during each flight. Crouched beneath the plane, Lamping points to a hard drive housing maybe 7 feet long.

"It's super souped-up, man," he says. "Data galore."

David Hood contributed to this report.