When you start to track problems with the F-35, you may discover that the problems have problems and that there are whole other branches of problems that you haven’t heard of, yet. It certainly makes me wonder if, perhaps, the whole thing is made up of problems; it’s possible. As long as the taxpayers are footing the bill, who cares?
This problem enters my awareness because of an article declaring that the problem has been solved. Oh, that’s good. Wait, what?
Readiness improved thanks to new glue for the canopy? Doesn’t that imply that there was a problem with the old glue? Perhaps that’s when someone from the F-35 program would swan in and say, “it’s not the old glue; it’s the old old glue. We’re on our 10th iteration of old glues and finally, readiness is improving!” It sounds like a Monty Python cheese shop sketch, only vastly more expensive and less funny.
Newer A, B and C Variant aircraft are averaging greater than 60 percent mission capable rates, with some units consistently at or above 70 percent.
Notice how the word “newer” in that sentence conditions the entire sentence? It’s saying that, if you have one of the older F-35s, it’s a piece of shit and your solution is to buy a newer one. At which point, the aircraft may be flyable more than 60% of the time, which is perilously close to saying “it’s flyable more than half the time!” I don’t think you can fairly call a plane that’s flyable 60+% of the time a “hangar queen” it’s maybe “the fresh prince of hangars” or something edgy like that.
We still haven’t gotten to the problem.
Q1.) What are the problems with the cockpit transparencies?
A1.) The primary source of unserviceable canopies is transparency coating delamination. Delamination occurs when the surface coatings on the canopy separate from the base transparency. Though this condition occurs through normal use, several transparencies have delaminated unexpectedly after only a couple hundred flight hours of use. This issue does not impact the airworthiness of the canopy or aircraft.
I’m sure that the pilot can still see enough to operate the plane. Besides, pilots do instrument landings, etc. “Delamination” sounds so much nicer than “came unglued and peeled off.” Presumably, at high speed – or what passes for high speed in an F-35.
Recent findings suggest that the principle cause is a change to the sealant between the transparency and the aircraft frame introduced in 2015 as a cost saving measure, which can be corrected by reverting to the previously used sealant. Canopies are now being delivered with the correct sealant, and the number of early delaminations is expected to decrease as a result. The correction will be verified after modified canopies have been delivered to the fleet and achieved several hundred flight hours without delamination.
Wait, what?! There are “cost saving measures” applied to an F-35? So someone thought it would be OK to use a cheaper sealant and it turned out they were expensively wrong. By going back to the original glue, the program expects to re-achieve the original results which – reading between the lines – were still delaminations, but they were not “early” They weren’t scheduled delaminations or planned-for delaminations. At this point, once again, I hear the ghost of Richard Feynman saying “if the design does not say ‘the cockpit cover unexpectedly peels off in flight’ then the implementation is wrong and you’re applying ‘engineering fixes’ to a questionable design.” If the durability of the glue and the covering were understood at design-time, the designers would be able to predict a failure-rate. And you’d have to ask what kind of imbecile designed a jet fighter’s canopy to peel away in the first place. That seems like a more appropriate exercise to perform in maintenance. In a hangar. Where the F-35 belongs.
The solution is simple: have a pipeline of replacement canopies.
The program has qualified a second vendor, PPG, to provide the capability to repair damaged transparencies from the fleet and return them to supply for use as replacement canopies. This action to qualify a second source to repair damaged canopies will greatly improve spares availability and will have a positive effect on F-35 mission capability status.
To be fair, part of the problem is that combat jets have canopies designed so that the pilot can eject from the aircraft in the event that it experiences an unscheduled departure from sustained flight. [How did I do with my military-ese there?] The canopy includes a flexible linear shaped charge; a rubbery band of high explosive designed to separate the canopy from the plane without separating the pilot’s face from the pilot’s head. And you thought that your driver’s side air bags were a big deal? [luke af]
Over the past two months, Airmen from the 56th Component Maintenance Squadron’s Egress Systems Flight developed a new process for the replacement of flexible linear shaped charges on F-35 Lightning II canopies.
In an emergency situation when an F-35 pilot is required to eject, the FLSC is the component responsible for destroying and separating the canopy from the rest of the jet, giving the pilot’s seat a clear path to depart the aircraft.
To ensure the charges function correctly and safely, they are regularly replaced. Before February, the process to replace the charges took several teams of maintainers more than a week.
“The explosives we maintain have expiration dates and life limits, may receive damage over time, and may face other issues,” said Staff Sgt. Ryan Bessery, 56th CMS egress technician. “When we first started replacing them, it was a very long process. Our first one took ten days. We knew we needed to speed it up.”
I have to admit that I immediately wondered whether the canopy explosives are controlled by a central processor on the aircraft, because I read somewhere else that the F-35’s wireless access system has security issues. But that’s another problem. Let’s not think too hard about having a bunch of aircraft blow their canopies at inconvenient times.
Back in the early 00’s I worked with a successful entrepreneur (actually, the guy who wrote Norton Antivirus; Peter Norton did not) who owned a two-engine jet, a Piper Comanchee if I recall correctly. I got to fly in the copilot seat (woot!) and since we were flying out of a small airport, he invited us to bring firearms if we wanted to. But that’s another story. During the course of the trip we discussed jet aircraft maintenance and I learned that they are heinously expensive to maintain because of all of the parts that get stressed, vibrated, heated, exposed to dust and air. For example, a complete engine tear-down and rebuild needs to be performed every couple of years, and costs $250,000/engine. That’s not even close to F-35 territory, of course. When you’ve got things like canopy delaminations and stealth coatings and a single engine that is running at the extreme of its performance in order to make enough power to move the aircraft – “flight readiness” is Air Force lingo for “spending a whole lot of money.”
So, the stealth coating, the canopy delamination, those are the big drivers in readiness rates? Or does the aircraft also suffer from spontaneous disassembly or sudden and gratuitous total existence failure?
“a sudden and gratuitous total existence failure” is Douglas Adams, from The Starship Titanic. Since we’re on that topic, do any of you recall the story about the “OFFOG” and how it came apart due to gravitational stresses? [baen]
In that picture, do we see the sergeant demonstrating aircraft combat readiness by showing how the pilot performs a karate chop?
Pierce R. Butler@#1:
In that picture, do we see the sergeant demonstrating aircraft combat readiness by showing how the pilot performs a karate chop?
Looks like he’s indicating the center of the strut. Or, as you say, how it can be chopped with the edge of a hand. If it’s necessary to center something on the strut, I’d expect there to be an indicator-mark machined into it, but I might be disappointed.
I think that the more relevant story on that site to link is:
Superiority
I sure hope Finland will keep away from the F-35 boondoggle our air force is in the process of choosing a new fighter to replace the Hornets we have now. Sadly F-35 is one of the candidates. I wonder if the canopy would delaminate if the planes are stored outdoors in lovely Finnish variable weather.
Other candidates for the new fighter are Dassault Rafale, Saab Gripen E, Eurofighter Typhoon and Boeing Super Hornet. The contractors are supposed to offer a complete system at a predetermined purchase price (10 000 million €) and yearly cost of operation (250 million €/year).
Probably not, a Piper Comanche is a single-engine prop aircraft. The Twin Comanche is two-engined, but still prop. Actually, I don’t think Piper has built any multi-jet aircraft. Maybe you are thinking of a Cessna Citation?
Every year in the English Lake District (apart from last year, obvs, and probably this year too) there’s a paragliding festival. The last bit of flying on the Saturday night is traditionally a bomb-burst of speedwings (small, very fast paragliders) lobbing off the nearest suitable top and screaming into the festival field. Also kind of traditionally, they get to that top in a helicopter. In the olden days it was the ex-Army Lynx belonging to the owner of the local slate mine. I’ve heard tales of the hair-raising trips up the side of the fells, barely missing the rocks. Sadly that helo and its pilot are no longer with us. More recently the uplift has been provided by an altogether more swish machine owned by a local software not-quite-billionaire. Instead of sliding doors and benches for squaddies there’s double glazing and leather seats for dignitaries and pop superstars.
I got chatting to the chap employed to run and sometimes pilot the chopper (when the owner isn’t flying it himself). A former Army officer, he described how his employer owned the chopper for short trips (e.g. to Amsterdam, say), but for longer journeys he also had a jet.
Now, I was a helicopter nerd my whole childhood, and always dreamed of owning one. Then I flew one, and realised how much a helicopter really, really wants to kill you, and gave that dream up. What had never factored into my calculations was what I learned from Army chap, which is just how much it costs to RUN even a civilian helicopter. I mean, the thing cost about £6m to buy, but the running costs were what really took my breath away. I can’t imagine that Army helis are any more economical.
What all this is coming round to is that I can’t imagine the F-35 is, in this case, that unusual in being hideously expensive to run. I can certainly see why they tried to cut costs on the canopy. And in fairness, every single part of that plane is going to have a Mean Time Between Failure, and some of them are going to be surprisingly short. The figures you quote are surprising but they’re presented without context. How often do they maintain or replace the canopy on an F-15? An F-22? A Typhoon? You can guarantee that all of those aircraft spend a LOT of time getting maintained – comedy stories about the F-35 would be more meaningful (and probably funnier) if there was contextualising information (e.g. “the F-35 needs new landing gear every hundred landings. For an F-15, it’s every THOUSAND.) And so on.
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Off topic: sitting in a Frankfurt airport hotel restaurant I overheard some Yanks on the next table (not difficult). They were obviously all pilots. One of them (presumably the only one of the three trained in the armed forces) observed that you can always tell a forces trained pilot from the way they land, AND tell which force they trained in. Standard civil pilots just land the plane. Air Force pilots have a ground crew who regard the plane as theirs, and woe betide any smartarse jet jockey who gets a scratch on the landing gear or causes them any extra work – hence Air Force pilots land so lightly you don’t feel it. Navy pilots, who train to land on bucking carrier decks in sidewinds at night, want to FEEL those wheel on the ground, so they SLAM IT IN.
Something to watch out for on your next flight.
From my somewhat limited understanding, if you sniff enough glue almost anything sounds like a good idea.
sonofrojblake @6:
I once flew on a small turboprop from St. Louis to Memphis. On takeoff, we rotated and almost immediately did a hard left turn. I looked out the window and saw the A concourse below us.
I asked the cabin attendant to ask the pilot to warn us if we were going to hook the approach-end barrier in Memphis. She was not amused, but I was.
That sounds so much more impressive than “half of the new ones won’t fly, and none of the old ones did.”
If your planes are only mission capable 60% of the time you can compensate by just buying more planes! (and spare parts)
It’s a win-win for the manufacturer.
The bit i’m surprised by is this:
don’t they have a testing setup to check this? “yeah, i think this’ll fix the problem with your billion plane”
I’m reminded of a time I got in SERIOUS TROUBLE in middle school, and was sitting in the vice-principal’s office. They were questioning me, and I was answering in a generally true, but vague manner, and just being quiet otherwise. At some point, this person informed me they could tell if someone was lying 60% of the time. which immediately caught my interest, and I ran a couple quick mental calculations – the cutoff for an “A” was 93%, “B” was like 85%?, I think “C” was ~ 80%, and I think “D” was like 75%, and anything below that was a failure. And all I could think of was this person is trying to threaten me with their lie-detecting acumen, when it’s an abject failure by their own institution’s grading system. Hell, it was an abject failure even with a generous two-grade bump. I don’t think I actually said anything about this, but it did make me question my decision to volunteer any information previously…
Ice Swimmer@#4:
Other candidates for the new fighter are Dassault Rafale, Saab Gripen E, Eurofighter Typhoon and Boeing Super Hornet.
Any of those is better than an F-35. Given Finland’s history in the winter war, I’m surprised that the Saab isn’t the hands-on favorite. Short/improvised runways are a really important feature. Also, any of those don’t come dragging the massive logistical tail of an F-35. F-35s suck your whole national economy into your air arm.
xohjoh2n@#9:
That sounds so much more impressive than “half of the new ones won’t fly, and none of the old ones did.”
They can afford the very best marketing people.
Hopefully, the marketing people don’t delaminate or require constant maintenance, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.
lochaber@#11:
I’m reminded of a time I got in SERIOUS TROUBLE in middle school, and was sitting in the vice-principal’s office
That sounds like an important “come and see the violence inherent in the system” moment of clarity for you. It’s fascinating how irrational the things are, that we take for granted.
Well, apparently, if you’re lucky with the F-35 you grabbed off the shelf, flyability or whatever goes up to seventy percent. But that’s all the upbeatness I can muster.
sonofrojblake has a good point in that we don’t have any comparison values. Ignoring that for a moment, and based on the sheer number of problems with the F-35 (and resulting MJR blogposts), maybe the pentagon should hire SpaceX to build them a ground-breaking, new reusable fighter craft. Sure, a couple of the early ones will crash (hence the ground-breaking, haw, haw) but they’ll get better and cheaper all the time. The F-35 appears to be getting more expensive all the time while maybe, possibly, we’re not quite sure, approaching previous perfomance levels?
Of course, if the DoD really wanted to save money on new tech they’d just approach some company that has never ever designed anything for them before. The company would be thrilled and eager to do well – their big break! – while being entirely ignorant of all the sh..tuff they can get away with dragging things out and making more money.
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“” If it’s necessary to center something on the strut, I’d expect there to be an indicator-mark machined into it, but I might be disappointed.””
I shudder to think the extra cost for an indicator, machined or even hand-pencilled as an afterthough, on a US-financed piece of military stealth hardware that has to fly. (There’s probably an executive bingo card out there with words like “flying”, “stealth”, “military” etc. on it. When you win that one it’s $$$-pupil time.)
sonofrojblake@#6:
. And in fairness, every single part of that plane is going to have a Mean Time Between Failure, and some of them are going to be surprisingly short. The figures you quote are surprising but they’re presented without context. How often do they maintain or replace the canopy on an F-15? An F-22? A Typhoon? You can guarantee that all of those aircraft spend a LOT of time getting maintained – comedy stories about the F-35 would be more meaningful (and probably funnier) if there was contextualising information (e.g. “the F-35 needs new landing gear every hundred landings. For an F-15, it’s every THOUSAND.) And so on.
That is a crucial point.
And, I don’t insist you take my word for this, but I spent an entire day trying to figure that out, when I first got interested in F-35s. (conspiracy theory voice) For some reason (/conspiracy theory voice) it appears to be very hard to get that information. There is a legitimate argument that it’s hard to make a comparison because the supply chains are so different and supply chain automation has a completely different effect – but I’d expect that enquiring minds would want to know whether the different supply chains made a difference on flight performance. For example, as you say, an F-16 might be flown until something starts to look dodgy about the nose-wheel steering system at which point it’s rebuilt, whereas an F-35 has a scheduled
failurerepair interval. One effect might be that the F-16 might be more prone to failures because the whole aircraft is not being rebuilt every so often, like the F-35, to keep it from failing on the flight-line. In my book, they’re all failures, it’s the difference between a controlled failure and an unexpected, gratuitous spontaneous disassembly.Put differently: if you can put “the canopy tears itself apart every so often” on a schedule, then it’s OK when it happens, you just check that it’s had its canopy failure at or behind schedule.
I’m serious, though – try to find a head-to-head comparison of “mean time between failure” of military aircraft. It appears to me that such things do not exist. Or, those that do exist are heavily cooked by proponents of thus and such aircraft, i.e.: when I dug into this I discovered that there are a lot of fans of the B-52 who see the fact that they haven’t fallen apart in the 70 years or whatever the airframes have been flying, as a huge plus. I mean, it is a plus – but does that make for a reasonable comparison against an F-35? Well, it’s a great metric if you like B-52s and so far absolutely zero F-35s have flown a fraction of the flight hours of even a sprightly young B-52 airframe. Conversely, more B-52s have crashed than F-35s, by flight hours and in general. That doesn’t mean F-35s aren’t pieces of shit with wings on them.
I found digging into this stuff to be a fascinating case study for a class I was teaching at the time on metrics (for computer security) – basically, I went in believing it was possible to establish metrics, and came out with a hangover and the taste of carpet on my tongue.
You owe me a new computer monitor, my old one is now covered in coffee.
@mjr – I don’t think it’s entirely surprising that the details of maintenance schedules of active duty military aircraft are something other than readily publicly available on the internet.
That said, I do find it interesting that there’s SUCH a downer on the F-35 particularly. For as long as I can remember, fighter planes have been a thing small boys, and the men they eventually become if they’re lucky, drool over and obsess over. I mean, over the summer of 1979 I even read a comic that was literally called Tornado, mainly because of the aircraft (although the interior was science fiction and action stories left over from the cancellation of other comics – see footnote). Model kits, posters, airshow appearances, documentary programmes – fighters are fetishised in a specific way few other pieces of military can compare to, going right back to Biggles and his Sopwiths, through Spitfires and up to stealth “fighters”.
And yet… as an adult living in the north west of England and flying as a hobby, I know more than a handful of chaps who actually work or have worked on the F-35, and I’ve met BAe’s chief test pilot, who although he mainly has dealings with the Typhoon, has presumably also flown the F-35 a bit and has informed opinions about it. Now: you talk to any of these people about the Typhoon, and the enthusiasm and pride is obvious. Talk to them about the F-35, and their attitude and body language are noticeably different. Even the chap who gave me the mousemat I’m using right now, which has pictures of the F-35 on it and a BAe logo shuffles his feet and looks at his shoes figuratively. It is, weirdly, not a project anyone seems proud of, and its status as a ludicrously expensive, barely functional boondoggle is widely, publicly known.
Pulling my tinfoil hat firmly down around my ears, I do wonder why this is. How you are able to secure enough information about this plane to point and laugh, but not enough to compare it meaningfully in any way with any planes that actually work. It’s inconceivable to me that the entire thing is a make-work smokescreen, but I do wonder if someone or ones are in the business of actively making it look bad.
Hanlon’s razor, though – don’t attribute to malice that which can be attributed to incompetence. I’m just boggled at the scale of the incompetence, I guess, and casting round for other explanations. Thus are conspiracy theories born, I suppose.
FOOTNOTE: Tornado comic is notable for a couple of things. First, in the manner of 2000AD with its alien “editor” Tharg (some bloke in a rubber mask), Tornado’s “editor” was a superhero called “Big E”. Entertainingly, he was depicted in the photos of him as a fat, slightly embarrassed looking bloke with black hair in a ridiculous costume. Only decades later did I discover that said slightly fat chap was in fact Dave Gibbons. THAT Dave Gibbons, the one who drew Watchmen.
One of the strips was called “Angry Planet”. It should be required reading for anyone thinking of taking up Elon Musk’s offer of moving to Mars. While it was about as scientifically accurate as you’d expect a comic aimed at ten year olds to be, pretty much the entire storyline was based on the observation that Mars is hellish horrible to live on and if you live there you’re entirely beholden to the people who put you there for literally everything up to and including the air you breathe. I was only thinking of it the other day due to a recent post on FtB. It’s available to read in full as a pdf somewhere on teh interwebs if you can be bothered to look for it.
The scale of the incompetence is merely the inevitable result of the mismatch between the scale and complexity of the project, and the (rather more limited) scale of the competence available to deliver it. You see this cropping up in all sorts of places (software being the one I’m most familiar with) – our ambitions simply exceed our capabilities. I’ve drawn analogies a number of times with the cathedral builders of the 13th and 14th centuries – we have these amazing visions, but we don’t really know how to achieve them, with the result that we keep building things that fail horribly. They eventually devised engineering principles that could solve their problems, but it remains to be seen whether we can do the same.
I suspect the fundamental problem is that project complexity is geometric, but competence isn’t. (I think it’s probably logarithmic.) I haven’t read Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, but as I understand it, his thesis is that increasing complexity eventually hits negative returns, but by that time people are so invested in the idea of solving problems by increasing complexity that they can’t break the habit. Sound familiar at all?
Dunc@#18:
I haven’t read Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, but as I understand it, his thesis is that increasing complexity eventually hits negative returns, but by that time people are so invested in the idea of solving problems by increasing complexity that they can’t break the habit. Sound familiar at all?
You mean we can’t engineer our way out of any given hole if we just “hole harder”? Inconceivable!
I disagree. I don’t accept that the F-35 is notably more complex than, say, the F-22, the Typhoon, or, say, the Apollo programme. Nobody on the F-22 or Typhoon shuffles in embarrassment. Yes, Apollo had a failure, but by crikey it had some successes and it hit the hardest of hard targets in terms of timescales against ludicrous odds.
What I think has happened is a failure of politics, not engineering. The real world demands a certain kind of aircraft-based defence. In some cases (F-22, Typhoon, others) those procuring respond to those demands more or less directly and pragmatically, get what they want more or less when they want it.
In the F-35, it looks like it’s responding to other incentives, and more importantly contradictory and shifting incentives. It’s not about the best plane for the job, it’s about the best plane for jobs – i.e. votes. Or it’s about building one plane to do a bunch of different jobs, none of them very well because of the compromises made to make it a jack of all trades. Or it’s about a whole bunch of other stuff different from “what would best serve the US Air Force for the next 20/30/40 years?”, which you’d think would be the main spec. That’s even leaving aside the cost. It’s just weird, I think.
The F-35 almost certainly has rather more computing power dedicated to engine management alone than existed on the entire planet at the time of the Apollo programme, and I believe its avionics and sensors are substantially more complex than in any similar aircraft. Then there’s the problem of their being four (?) different variants with rather different operational requirements, as a result of trying to make the damn thing be all things to all men… Not to mention the spiffying idea of spreading its logistics chain across practically every state in the US and a good chunk of the rest of NATO besides. That’s a lot of complexity to manage.
You’re right – my bad. Reference to Apollo was probably me wildly overestimating it’s actual physical complexity. Colour me wrong.
The Apollo program was a wild success story of management of complexity. Engineering, sure, huge expense, of course, immense human effort, granted, but it was the ability to manage complex interrelated systems that made it a success. I can’t escape the sensation that, on one hand, we got absurdly cocky, and, on the other hand, we forgot the goal of those processes and we’re cargo-culting the shit out of complexity management these days.
Apollo was complicated, sure, but you could manage it with a bunch of smart guys with side rules. At the end of the day, it was a big firework – a really fucking complicated firework, sure, but still just a contraption of valves and actuators and Venturi nozzles. There are physical limitations on just how complicated you can make that shit. The F-35 is all of that, but all operated with software, with a massive overlay of sensors and targeting systems and fly-by-wire avionics, also all integrated with software – and there is no physical limit to the complexity of software. Flying Apollo was a relatively simple matter of hydraulics and linkages, whereas the F-35 flies itself through software, with the pilot just providing high-level suggestions as to what it ought to do. It’s a completely different order of magnitude.
Also, it’s worth remembering that Apollo was insanely expensive. I’ve drunk too much fine malt whisky to do the numbers properly right now, but I’m pretty damn sure it was way more expensive, in terms of fraction of GDP, than the F-35.
None of this should be interpreted as a defense of the stupid damn thing though.
I’ve also apparently drunk too much fine malt whisky to be able to close an italic tag properly… Sorry.
Also, slide rules, not “side rules”, FFS…
My point exactly. The Apollo program was a fairly close call, systems-wise. It was at the edge of what we could do then. Our brains have not gotten better since the 1960s. Why do we think we can handle two orders of magnitude more complexity, but with less brilliant people and much less motivation? We do have software to make things easier now, but we also have software to make things much, much more complicated.
The problem is, I think, that the people who sign the cheques listen to the people who tell them the first part of that sentence, people who buy them agreeable dinners at expensive restaurants. The people who tell them the second half of the sentence bang their hand on the table and get ignored or fired. Which is how we get where we’ve got. I think the central triumph of Apollo was that for a hallowed few years engineers were allowed to do engineering and anyone who tried to stop them was moved the fuck out of the way. Challenger demonstrated what happens when you let non-engineers get in the way who have other priorities.