PAUL LEWIS & GRAHAM WARWICK / WASHINGTON DC GUY NORRIS / LOS ANGELES, STEWART PENNEY / LONDON
Key suppliers are set to play a more central role on the Lockheed Martin Joint Strike Fighter than on previous combat aircraft programmes
The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) programme has been billed as the biggest single defence procurement ever, so it should be no surprise that aerospace companies large and small are queueing up to participate in the $24 billion development phase and projected 3,000-aircraft production run.
Around 80 European and US companies and organisations have signed on to the F-35 programme, with many more waiting in the wings. For prime contractor Lockheed Martin, managing and integrating this multi-national team could prove its biggest challenge.
Friday, 26 October, was a nerve-wracking day not only for Boeing and Lockheed Martin, but also for the teams of suppliers they had both assembled in their respective bids to win the JSF competition. When Lockheed Martin was declared the winner of the largest and perhaps last contest of its kind, the "winner-takes-all" contract set a challenge not only for the prime contractor but also for an international supplier base reshaped by consolidation.
Within days of the system development and demonstration (SDD) contract being signed, the first order of business was to bring the JSF Programme Office management in line with Lockheed Martin's integrated product team (IPT) structure. "We had to make sure we're all on the same sheet of music," says new JSF programme director Maj Gen Jack Hudson.
"One of the things we're trying to do is have a counterpart for Lockheed Martin at all management levels. In other words, Lockheed Martin has a person that takes care of the air vehicles, and I have a person here that does that. We're trying to line them up so people are looking at each other eyeball to eyeball."
IPTs are a feature of other major development programmes such as the Lockheed Martin/Boeing F-22 and Bell Boeing V-22, but JSF will take the integration to anew depth and breath. In addition to the programme office and prime contractor, the IPT structure will also encompass suppliers and extend down several tiers to include specific systems such as flight controls.
This marks a move away from the traditional flow-down, equipment-based IPT structure to a flow-up, system-based approach where the entire supplier chain shares in the risks and is encouraged to meet customer requirements.
Key suppliers
The new structure involves not just having critical suppliers represented on key IPTs, such as air vehicles and mission systems, but in other areas such as autonomic logistics. The SDD task includes designing support and training systems that will accompany the aircraft into the field.
"There are key suppliers laying out the architecture for the training system that have to reuse the [software] codes from the aircraft. Most are more advisory, or are embedded in IPTs to help develop the system," explains Art Price, Lockheed Martin JSF director subcontract management.
Lockheed Martin has its team arranged into four tiers, starting at the top with major subassembly and module build-up partners BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman. Level 2 is comprised of "key- critical" or "pervasive" system suppliers, which are selected to provide a common solution across the three F-35 variants, such as wire-harness supplier Fokker Elmo. Level 3 players are component-specific build-to-print suppliers. Level 4 vendors will be required to sign "right-to-buy" contracts, offering material such as titanium or commodities like fasteners to any F-35 supplier at a pre-agreed price, which Lockheed Martin estimates could shave up to $2 million off the flyaway cost of each JSF.
Around 70% of Level 2 players have already been selected - about 42 companies, with some under either Northrop Grumman or BAE's workshare. Several key supplier positions remain to be filled, including those for the F-35's arresting hook, standby flight display, canopy fracture and removal system, marker beacon and communication/navigation/identification apertures. No Level 3 players have yet been selected, and only around half of Level 4 players have been identified. "We'll complete most of the Level 2 and commodities first, with Level 3 behind that. Level 4 players are the long pole in the tent in any airframe development, because you have to have the raw material in place to begin machining," says Price.
The degree of integration of these various players into the IPTs is breaking new ground, and this has driven the need for improved web-enabled management and communications tools to link companies. While IPT participants will be co-located in the initial phase of SDD, there will be a gradual migration to "virtual co-location" via a wide-area network.
Lockheed Martin has established a "global collaborative information-sharing environment" for the F-35 programme, says engineering and manufacturing planning manager John Burdette. The firm has deployed software tools, allowing the principal partners to share design and business data in near real-time while protecting proprietary information. "We are all used to being primes, which can get sporty in a collaborative environment. We have to learn how to share information," he says.
The US Department of Defense and UK Ministry of Defence will soon be brought on to the system, which will also be rolled out to the supplier base, Burdette says. Tools include SRDC's Metaphase product data-management system for design information and Parametric Technology's Windchill for business data. The web-based tools are shared via virtual privacy network, with 100% data encryption as it passes between company firewalls.
The JSF concept demonstration phase (CDP) "was the proving ground for the IT [information technology]", says Burdette. To test the software toolset, as well as the companies' ability to work together, wing work for the X-35 concept demonstrators was artificially split between Lockheed Martin in Fort Worth, Texas, and Palmdale, California, Northrop Grumman in El Segundo, California, and BAE in the UK. "We would never split the work that way, but it did give us a tremendous insight into how to make the tools work", says Martin Taylor, BAE JSF programme director.
Many of the IPTs are not in fact led by Lockheed Martin, but by its principal partners Northrop Grumman and BAE. The two companies are represented across the F-35 management structure, and the mission systems and airframe IPTs are led respectively by Northrop Grumman's Peter Shaw and Martin McLaughlin. A key aspect of BAE's involvement will be in the short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) version, with the company due to take charge of the flight-test programme at the US Navy's Patuxent River, Maryland, test centre, as well as performing fatigue and static testing in the UK.
International scope
Foreign participation in the IPTs also extends down to Level 2, with Fokker Aerostructures, for example, tasked with producing all of the F-35's doors with the exception of those for weapons bays and aft vectoring nozzle. The scope of international participation is set to grow as more nations, such as Italy and Turkey, join the SDD programme. This has presented some unique challenges in terms of security clearance, which has required the US government to expand its technical assistance agreements to facilitate foreign access to the programme.
"If you were to draw a work breakdown structure, either in mission vehicle, airframe or autonomic systems, what you would find is BAE all over the chart," says Martin Taylor, who until recently was the team's subcontract management director. As a measure of BAE's and Northrop Grumman's importance, in airframe workshare alone they jointly account for 57% of the structure including the centre and aft fuselage, and vertical and horizontal stabilisers. Lockheed Martin will build the nose section and wing, all low-observable edges and perform final assembly. Historically, the latter activity accounted for as much as 20% of the airframe effort, but the modular design concept and pre-stuffed subassemblies has reduced airframe mating and delivery to less than 5%.
"We broke the aircraft where it seemed logical, and let the airframe content fall out from that. Adjustments to meet team agreements were done in other areas," says McLaughlin. The natural break line for Northrop Grumman's El Segundo-designed mid-fuselage section, which accounts for around 32% of the fighter's structural weight, was defined by the aircraft's inlet duct and weapons bay, which is delivered with integrated hardpoints and outfitted with equipment. Similarly, the demarcation point for the BAE-supplied aft fuselage was determined by the intercept point between the wing rear-spar and final mid-fuselage frame rather than any prescribed political workshare split.
BAE's Salmesbury plant will be responsible for manufacturing the rear fuselage, along with key engineering tasks including airframe structural design. BAE Warton will be responsible for the fuel and de-icing systems and crew escape, integrating the ejection seat and associated life support. BAE is also helping to develop the support strategy for the aircraft, which is complicated by the different basing needs and logistics approaches of the four customers. The UK company's JSF involvement is integrated into a "one-company organisation, with virtual co-location, sharing IT and engineering tools via a single network," says Mike Raettig, BAE's JSF head of project and chief engineer.
The participation of BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman as suppliers has been eclipsed by their roles as the principal partners. Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, and Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems, for example, are co-developing two key sensors for the F-35: the electro-optical distributed aperture system (DAS) and electro-optical targeting system (EOTS).
Lockheed Martin is leading the EOTS effort, while Northrop Grumman is leading development of the DAS as well as supplying the active electronically scanned array radar and operating the team's avionics flying testbed.
BAE's UK-based Avionics group is also participating in development of the EOTS, contributing to overall design and responsible for the laser subsystem. Although more closely associated with Boeing's JSF bid, BAE's avionics business - formerly Marconi Electronics Systems - provides several systems to Lockheed Martin, including the active stick-and-throttle cockpit controls. Steve Mallon, BAE Avionics JSF programme director, says: "Marconi was seeking to offer systems to both players. We offered core capabilities, so there were parallels [between the company's involvement on the X-35 and Boeing X-32]."
BAE's share was boosted by its acquisition last year of Lockheed Martin's Sanders electronic-warfare (EW) subsidiary and its Control Systems business, which is supplying the vehicle management computer at the heart of the flight control system. BAE's USA arm is leading integration of the F-35's low-observable EW system, a role it already performs on the F-22 and would have performed even if Boeing had been awarded the JSF contract. "Whichever team won, we were the designated EW integrator," says Don Donovan, vice president and general manager F-22 and JSF.
For BAE USA as a whole, the SDD phase is worth about $750 million and secures the company key positions on the Lockheed Martin team. For the former Sanders, the development contract alone "is the single largest ever received", says Donovan, and the EW work is expected to be worth between $7 billion and $8 billion over the programme's lifetime. BAE UK will also participate in EW system development, as will Northrop Grumman after its recent acquisition of Litton.
While BAE USA was in a "win-win" position on the EW system, the fortunes of other key suppliers hung on the downselect. Had Boeing won JSF "it would have been a very different picture for our military landing-gear business," says Brian Gora, president Goodrich Landing Gear Systems. Instead, the company has a "very significant" contract to integrate the complete F-35 landing system, "potentially the largest military contract ever for landing gear," he says, worth between $4 billion and $5 billion over the programme's life.
Lockheed Martin has handed integration responsibility for major F-35 subsystems to their suppliers. Examples include Parker Aerospace for the entire fuel system, Honeywell the integrated power and thermal management system, Eaton the 276bar (4,000lb/in2) utility hydraulic system and Hamilton Sundstrand/Smiths Aerospace the electrical power system. "The prime is moving up the value chain, and Lockheed Martin looks to Goodrich to manage the entire landing gear integration effort," says Dick Strehle, vice president and general manager military landing systems.
One key difference from previous fighter programmes is that many of the suppliers will also be responsible for after market support of their products. "Another new thing is that support and logistics for the subsystems will this time be the suppliers' responsibility," says Strehle. With affordability as the key goal of the JSF programme, the military is interested in commercial after market concepts such as power-by-the-hour support, he says.
Participation growth
Some companies have seen their participation on JSF transformed by acquisitions. Rockwell Collins values its JSF participation at more than $2 billion over the life of the programme, in both its traditional communication/navigation/identification (CNI) business and its recently acquired Kaiser Aerospace and Electronics displays subsidiary. While the company would have provided radio elements to CNI integrator TRW regardless of who won JSF, Kaiser was not on the Boeing team.
Now the company finds itself with a significant role on Lockheed Martin's crew station development team - "a step higher than in previous programmes", say John Borghese, vice president Kaiser Electronics. The company is providing the single large touch-screen projection display that forms the F-35's instrument panel and, through its Vision Systems International joint venture with Elbit, supplying the wide field-of-view helmet-mounted display.
The transatlantic nature of the JSF programme finds several companies sharing work between their UK and US arms. Smiths says its F-35 involvement, expected to be worth more than $10 billion, is split fairly evenly between the UK and USA. As a result of its acquisition of TI Dowty, the company ended up with similar stakes on both JSF teams, "but the mix was very different", says Bill Mawer, group director of marketing and strategy. "Dowty was strong on the Boeing team, and Smiths was strong on the Lockheed Martin team."
On the F-35, Smiths is "involved across our businesses: avionics, power and actuation", says Mawer. The company is supplying the complete 270V electrical power system jointly with Hamilton Sundstrand; the actuation package for the Rolls-Royce-supplied lift-system on the short take-off and vertical landing variant; and weapons control electronics. Smiths is bidding for more work on the aircraft, including in- flight control actuation, prognostic health management and standby instruments, and is creating a single focal point for its involvement on the programme, he says.
Suppliers praise the work already done in getting the programme under way rapidly. "Lockheed Martin was impressive in how they ran the phase from bid to downselect," says Mawer. "They were not sitting back waiting for a decision. Lockheed Martin was ready to hit the ground running." BAE USA's Donovan agrees: "They were 'Day One' ready to go and had all the suppliers ready to go. They had a party one day and were working the next." n
Source: Flight International
