Defense News:
Protecting JSF, Marines Fire at F/A-18E/F
U.S. Navy Calls Shots Off-Target
By CHRISTOPHER P. CAVAS, NAVAL AIR STATION PATUXENT RIVER, Md.
Inside Naval Air Systems Command headquarters at this southern Maryland base, U.S. Navy program officials for the F/A-18 Super Hornet strike fighter program have heard the
stories circulating at the Pentagon.
Their aircraft, the stories go, can’t carry certain weapons, can’t fly high enough, can’t go fast enough.
Design problems such as wing flutter plague the plane and — perhaps worst of all — parts will wear out so fast that the plane’s lifespan will be severely shortened. There’s just one problem with the stories, Navy officials say: None of them are true. “We’re really scratching our head thinking what’s going on,” said Capt. Don Gaddis, Super Hornet program manager.
So who is spreading these stories about the plane? The answer, which surprised some program officials, is the Marines.
The Marine Corps isn’t even part of the Super Hornet program. They’re planning on replacing their aging Hornets and AV-8B Harrier jump jets with the F-35B short-takeoff-or-vertical-landing (STOVL) version of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). So why do the Marines even care about the Super Hornet?
“The Marines seem to be trying to discredit the Super Hornet as a way of heading off efforts to cut their purchase of the STOVL JSF,” said Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute think tank, Arlington, Va.
“If JSF is delayed,” said naval analyst Norman Polmar, “the Marines will be forced to buy Super Hornet, which will leave them with nothing to operate off amphibious ships.”
The STOVL JSF for the Marines isn’t set to enter service until 2012 at the earliest. The Corps, unlike the Navy, is strongly committed to the new strike fighter and is eagerly anticipating an all-STOVL aviation strike force.
But the JSF program has suffered several delays, and in contrast to the Marines, neither the Pentagon — the Navy and Air Force also will fly the plane — nor Congress seem to have a sense of urgency about keeping the program on schedule and getting the aircraft into service.
The Marines are afraid that if their plane is struck by further delays, they won’t be able to buy new JSFs fast enough to replace their aging strike aircraft, leaving a sort of “bathtub” where the Marines might need something else to bridge the gap between new planes and old. Into that gap, the Marines fear, could fly the Super Hornet. And for each new F/A-18 the Marines get, that’s likely one less STOVL JSF.
“We’ve had this vision for a long time to be an all-STOVL force,” Brig. Gen. Robert Walsh, the Marines’ deputy assistant commandant for aviation, said June 7 in his Pentagon office. “We’re a swing force where we can go expeditionary, land on a big runway at a major operating base. We can go smaller runway, [conduct] dispersed, distributed operations. We can go on amphibious shipping, we can go on large aircraft carrier decks. We can pretty much go everywhere with the flexibility the JSF STOVL brings.”
The aircraft the Marines are most worried about replacing sooner rather than later are the Harriers and the two-seat F/A-18D Hornets, Walsh said.
“Our F/A-18A+ and F/A-18C Hornets aren’t in that bad shape,” he said, “but we’re watching them very closely because we’ve got hour and fatigue limits on those aircraft.”
The high operations tempo for all aircraft in recent years “has caused some stress between us and the Navy,” Walsh said. “There’s pressure there in how you reduce the strike-fighter shortfall.”
F/A-18 Super Hornets already are flying with the Navy — the single-seat F/A-18E replaced older Hornet aircraft and the two-seat F/A-18F replaced the fleet’s F-14 Tomcats. A new two-seat EA-18G electronics countermeasure version is scheduled to begin operational evaluation next year.
Three versions of the F-35 JSF are being developed — F-35A for the Air Force, F-35B STOVL for the Marines and the British Royal Navy, and the F-35C carrier version for the Navy. But the $276 billion program — the largest single program in the defense budget — also is a fat target for budget cutters, and worries persist that the program will continue to suffer delays.
Hence, the Marines are worried about being sucked into the Super Hornet program to the detriment of their JSFs.
Problems? ‘Déjà Vu’
Several unofficial briefings and papers listing alleged defects with the Super Hornets have circulated for at least a year inside the Pentagon. Some have been leaked to the press, including Defense News.
The Marines officially disavow the materials.
“Unofficial, unendorsed and old briefs are nothing more than opinions which may have been used to make decisions on which direction Marine aviation was headed long ago,” said Maj. Eric Dent, a Marine Corps spokesman. “They do not represent the one position that matters — the Marine Corps’ official position, which is: The F-35B represents the centerpiece of Marine Corps’ aviation, and this is supported by the program of record.”
Still, the allegations continue to make the rounds. A recent story in the Boston Globe about one of the alleged problems sent program officials hurrying up to Capitol Hill to reassure Congress there were no serious issues with the aircraft.
“This is déjà vu,” Gaddis said from the headquarters of Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) at Patuxent River. “Some of those things they’re digging up are literally 12 to 15 years old.”
Gaddis and his team actually have a game plan for each time the issues reappear.
“Every so often, about every two or three years, these questions come up. We can answer pretty much anything you want answered,” he said.
Widespread enthusiasm for the Super Hornet throughout the naval aviation community belies the alleged problems with the aircraft. The Boeing-built twin-engine jet, a development of the original McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 Hornet, entered service in 1999. Originally intended as a stop-gap measure between the demise of the old A-6 Intruder and failed A-12 replacement and the JSF, the Super Hornet has legions of admirers despite some shortcomings. With the APG-79 Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar installed in new aircraft, the Navy is even more enthusiastic.
“By any measure — reliability, availability, flexibility, bombs dropped, accuracy — we exceeded the F/A-18Cs in expectations across the board,” said Capt. Jeffrey Penfield, head of air-to-air missile systems for NAVAIR.
Penfield, who commanded Strike Fighter Squadron 115 during 2003’s invasion of Iraq and wrote the operational evaluation for the Super Hornet, is adamant in his support for the aircraft.
“It went beyond expectation,” he declared. “It knocked the ball out of the park.”
Gaddis, Penfield and the Super Hornet team at NAVAIR patiently addressed numerous alleged issues with the aircraft.
• Claim: There is still “manageable wing flutter” with the aircraft and the “wing drop” problem persists.
• Rebuttal: “We do not have a flutter problem with this airplane and have never had a flutter problem,” declared Gaddis. “The only thing we can think of is they are getting it confused with the old wing-drop problem. That was solved.”
The NAVAIR engineers noted that wing drop and wing flutter are very different phenomena. Flutter, explained engineer Mike Masse, “is a self-excited oscillation,” basically vibrations that cause aircraft instability. “There are no stability problems or restrictions on F/A-18 E/F,” he said.
The well-publicized wing-drop problem that was discovered during tests in 1997 was an entirely different situation, said Super Hornet chief engineer Ed Hovanesian.
“It’s a momentary loss [of lift] on one wing,” he said, causing a quick roll-off in a specific portion of the flight envelope.
Although a slight vibration — dubbed “residual lateral activity” — remains, a series of fixes essentially solved the problem by 1999, he said.
Now, “as you pull the airplane, you get a little bit of lateral oscillation that is only there from 7.8 to 8.1 degrees [angle of attack]. You can pull a little bit harder and it’s gone. You can pull a little bit less and it’s gone.” Many pilots notice no effect at all, he said.
“The most important thing about it,” Hovanesian added, “is it did not cause any task abandonment.”
• Claim: The wing drop led to the weapon pylons being canted outboard six degrees, causing increased wear on weapons and severely cutting their ability to acquire a target before launch.
• Rebuttal: Canting the pylons is “totally different,” said Gaddis. “It’s not related [to wing drop] in any form.
“That’s been a myth for about 12 to 14 years,” he declared.
“We never flew the aircraft with straight pylons,” Hovanesian said.
Rather, they pointed out, the cant was developed to ensure proper weapon separation as bombs and missiles are launched from the aircraft. The Super Hornets have three weapon stations under each wing compared with two on the older Hornets, and a four-degree outboard cant was developed to increase the distance between weapons.
One by one, the team debunked the other allegations. Missiles are not showing excessive wear due to the cant, they said. There are no unusual weight, speed or altitude limitations with a combat-loaded aircraft.
“The Charlie [F/A-18C] with a full load has the same limitations” in altitude and speed, Penfield said, while the Super Hornet has no problems carrying its top-rated full load of 66,000 pounds. “The airplane launches at 66,000 all the time.”
A claim that weight restriction problems extend to the new EA-18G Growler also was brushed aside. Test aircraft have flown with five ALQ-99 electronics warfare pods, Gaddis said. The pods weigh about 1,000 pounds each.
There are no restrictions for carrying certain weapons, the team said, other than weapons which have not yet gone through a certification process.
Another claim says the aircraft cannot go supersonic while carrying a full weapons load.
“It wasn’t designed for that,” Penfield said.
Critics also claim delivery of weapon pylons is two years behind schedule and not enough pylons are available, limiting training for the Super Hornets.
“The idea about being two years late on pylon delivery is just not true,” Gaddis said. Early aircraft were delivered with no pylons due to a previous $440 million budget cut, he said, but the issue was resolved with more funding. “We were in catch-up mode,” he said, until supply caught up with demand “about two years ago.”
Gaddis and Hovanesian scoffed at claims that not enough pylons are available for training.
“Squadrons don’t want all that equipment,” Gaddis said.
“Why carry six bombs when you can just carry one for training?” Hovanesian said. “It’s just cost.”
Most importantly, Gaddis said, “we do not have a service-life issue with this airplane.”
The Boston Globe article reported that failure of some parts could cause the aircraft’s planned 6,000-flight-hour life to be limited to 3,000 hours. “That was probably one of the most egregious statements” in the article, he said.
The problem referred to in the article, called an “interwing pylon crack,” would have shortened the planes’ lives, but it has been solved, he said.
“We found it early on” and a redesigned part already is being installed on new aircraft, he said, with a retrofit planned for earlier aircraft long before they reach any flight-hour limitations.
“The Navy has decided to fly this aircraft to 9,000 hours,” he said. “We can get to 6,000 hours now and we’re doing the analysis to figure how we get to 9,000 hours.”
Rear Adm. Bruce Clingan, director of the Navy’s Air Warfare Division in the Pentagon, said June 4 there are no plans to integrate the aircraft into Marine Corps aviation. Walsh noted that even if the Marines’ F/A-18Cs and A+ models wear out before they can be replaced with F-35Bs, Navy F/A-18Cs replaced by Super Hornets could be used by the Marines until more STOVLs are available.
“We can’t have a big huge beast,” Walsh said about the need for STOVL JSF. “We need a small footprint.” •
E-mail:
ccavas@defensenews.com.
Abs!!
