The F-35 program appears to have emerged from years of controversy and developmental turbulence, but there are ways it could still go “off the rails,” according to Lt. Gen. Christopher C. Bogdan, who retired in July after completing nearly five years of what was planned to be a two-year tour as the strike fighter program manager.
The F-35 program is slated to hit one of its biggest milestones—the completion of system design and development (SDD)—late this year, when it starts delivering the first F-35s in the Block 3F configuration. This version, finally, represents the baseline aircraft that fulfills the Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy’s basic wartime needs. Those aircraft already serving operationally have earlier, transitional versions of the F-35 software and weapons capabilities. Bogdan said he thinks this move from development to full-up production makes for a good time to hand over the program to new leadership. He was succeeded by his deputy, then-Rear Adm. Mathias W. Winter, after a May 25 ceremony.
In an interview with Air Force Magazine, Bogdan discussed major “turning points” that convinced him the massive effort would succeed, the state of the relationship between the Pentagon and its major F-35 contractors, and how he thinks the project will evolve in the future.
Asked what the biggest risks to the F-35 program are from here on out, Bogdan replied, “I am worried about our ability to sustain these airplanes globally, with the numbers and locations we’ll have in 10 to 15 years,” as “there’s going to be an awful lot of airplanes in an awful lot of places in an awful lot of configurations.”
The US services alone expect to buy more than 2,400 F-35s, and international partners and foreign military sales customers are expected to buy a similar number. There are already dozens of operating locations, worldwide, identified for the F-35. The 200-plus aircraft already delivered are in many different configurations and will all require modifications to bring them up to 3F standard. It will be a massive enterprise—even more so than the development effort—and both user governments and industry need to prepare themselves to cope with its demands.
The ability of industry and government together to “sustain all those airplanes and all those customers well, and do it affordably, is probably the biggest risk to the program right now,” Bogdan asserted.
Normally, a prime contractor leads the effort to choose its sustainment subcontractors, suppliers, and regional depots or repair facilities, but the F-35 is so politically and technologically complex that these “value judgments … cannot simply be left to industry,” Bogdan said. The US government, its partners, and the services all “need to be involved,” he said.
Because there are so many interim configurations of the F-35—across the three variants—there is a profusion of parts that only fit a specific batch of airplanes, and that’s a headache still plaguing the program, Bogdan said. Some of those parts “have moved on” to a new design, but earlier jets have yet to catch up through retrofit.
Not only that, some of the “pieces and parts” aren’t meeting reliability and maintainability goals. A fuel pump, for example, expected to stay on the jet 5,000 hours may only last 3,000 hours, leading to greater-than-expected maintenance. The depot enterprise to fix those parts isn’t fully up and running yet, forcing such components to go back to the vendor for repair. That, in turn, slows the delivery of brand-new parts.
“We know all the bad actors,” Bogdan said of this situation. “We need to continue to improve the on-wing time of those components.” Some may need a redesign because “the way we’re operating them is not quite what it looked like on paper.”
Healthy Skepticism
Taking over as director of the strike fighter in the fall of 2012, Bogdan had his doubts. The F-35 was way over budget and years behind schedule. In the press, it was always linked with descriptors such as “troubled” or problem-plagued.
He inherited the project from Vice Adm. David J. Venlet, whom Bogdan credits with giving the F-35 its chance to succeed. Venlet secured permission from Congress and the Pentagon to restructure the program—adding money and years to the timetable and setting a new schedule for fielding the jet. When Bogdan took over, he pledged that he would not ask for any more money or any more time to deliver the F-35.
Bogdan and Venlet realized at the outset that the structure of succession for program leadership wouldn’t work. To balance the needs of the two biggest customers, the Air Force and Navy were slated to swap leadership of the project every two years, with other levels interleaved with authority. Under the original vision, a Navy program executive officer (PEO) would have an Air Force deputy and answer to the Air Force acquisition executive. Two years later, the structure would flip.
They went to the Pentagon leadership and argued that “we ought to change the charter” because repairing the culture of the dysfunctional program would take time, Bogdan recalled.
“Consistency of leadership” was critical, he said, along with consistency of message to Congress, the partners, and industry. Moreover, “people have to know, both on the industry side and the government side, that they can’t wait you out.” The two-year leadership rule was changed so that the PEO could stay “as long as the leadership wants them to be there.” He was gratified that at the two-, three-, and four-year points, “apparently, they liked” what he was doing because Bogdan was asked to stay in the job. Five years, though, he thought was “enough.”
“I appreciate them letting me go now,” he said.
Bogdan admitted, “I broke some glass” on taking over the project. At the 2012 AFA annual conference, he declared the relationship with Lockheed Martin, the F-35’s prime contractor, to be “the worst I’ve ever seen,” and he warned that cultural changes were due. The comment, he said, was “my shot across the bow to tell everybody” that a shake-up was due.
In the months that followed, Bogdan tightened up the program office and held contractors’ feet to the fire. In staff meetings, when one of his officers presented news of a technical problem, if it was the fault of a vendor, Bogdan would ask, “What do we say?” and would answer his own question as he had many times: “We’re not paying for that.”
Things started to improve. Airplanes were delivered, and pilot training got underway. The pace of flight testing edged up. Costs stabilized and began to decline. Schedules started to be met. But Bogdan was keenly aware that with 1,300 vendors, four major prime contractors, three services, eight international partners, and over 10 million lines of programming, the F-35 was a massive cat-herding job and perpetually just one crisis away from termination.
In June 2014, it looked like that crisis might have arrived. During takeoff roll for a training flight, an F-35 at Eglin AFB, Fla., caught fire on the ground. The pilot quickly escaped and no one was injured, but the airplane was badly damaged, the fleet had to be grounded, and the program’s head of steam seemed to evaporate.
The fire “was a very big deal and it happened at a very bad time,” Bogdan said. The fire embarrassingly canceled the F-35’s planned premiere at the Farnborough International Air Show in the UK, then only days away.
The Joint Program Office (JPO) worked 24/7 to identify the cause of the fire, fix the problem, and get the show rolling again. Over a few months, the problem was figured out—engine fan blades rubbing excessively in a groove—aircraft were allowed to return to flight (with more frequent inspections) and a fix was developed.
“That was really the first time,” Bogdan said, that he thought the program would really come together and make good. “From a technical perspective, ... I thought, ‘Hmmm, we’re probably getting better.’ ”
Bogdan gained more confidence from solving problems with the F-35 pilot’s helmet, which he described as a key sensor of the airplane. He broke with Venlet’s approach, canceling an alternative source competition. Rockwell Collins and Elbit, the helmet contractors, realized “I was putting my chips” on them, he said, and that told them “they better get this thing solved.” His gesture of confidence “changed their attitude” and “helped them come up with better solutions.”
The arrestor hook for the Navy version didn’t work. “We couldn’t trap anything” with the original hook design, Bogdan recalled, and “from the Navy’s point of view, if you cannot land on an aircraft carrier, you don’t have a C model.”
It was a credit to Lockheed Martin, he said, that “they let us” hand over redesign authority for the system to Fokker, builder but not designer of the hook. This third physical correction convinced Bogdan that the JPO could solve any problem, expeditiously.
