When discussing the stakes of the competition to build 350 new advanced training jets for the US Air Force, the bidders prefer not to frame the outcome in stark “do-or-die” terms. “I don’t think it’s live or die,” says Marc Lindsley, programme manager for Leonardo, which has proposed selling the T-100 variant of its M-346 for the $16 billion contract. “We are selling the -346 around the world.”
But there is no question the pending contact for the T-X advanced pilot training family of systems will shape the global market for supersonic trainers. The winner – either Boeing’s clean-sheet T-X, Leonardo’s Alabama-made T-100 or Lockheed Martin’s South Carolina-built T-50A – will become the de facto market leader for decades to come.
“This is a big programme. It’s a lot of aircraft. You don’t see a lot of programmes these days where this many aircraft are being purchased,” Lindsley says.
Such enthusiasm has pushed the bidding teams to invest heavily in their candidates. As a result, air force evaluators have the rare opportunity in the modern era to choose from a diverse field of high-performance aircraft without having spent a penny of taxpayers’ money on prototypes.
The T-100 is flying at Leonardo’s manufacturing base in Venegono, Italy. Lockheed has flown T-50As in Greenville, South Carolina. Boeing opted to develop a clean-sheet design for the T-X contract, yet still built and flew two “production-ready” examples to comply with the air force’s requirements to participate in the bidding.
Boeing is approaching the T-X challenge with an all-new aircraft, and has flown two examples
Boeing
“In the old days when you turned in proposals you didn’t put out flying artefacts. You just gave them paper and said, ‘Here you go’,” says Tom Connard, Boeing’s T-X capture team leader. “Take all the words away. The jet’s flying, the simulator to train the pilots to go fly the jet [is operating]. So we’ve proved it all out on our own upfront investment.”
The air force, in return, set up one of the most complex evaluation formulas the industry has seen in any competition for a military contract. Instead of simply evaluating cost, risk and performance, the air force prescribed how much it is willing pay for proposals that offer more performance than the service requires.
Rob Weiss, executive vice-president and general manager of Lockheed’s advanced development programmes division – also known as the Skunk Works – says he has not seen a similar approach before in a government solicitation. “And I don’t think Lockheed Aeronautics has seen it either,” Weiss says. “I think it’s an innovative approach by the government to try to monetise capabilities that they like.”
The air force’s solicitation contains more than 100 requirements, ranging from the size of pilots that must be accommodated by the cockpit to the visual quality of the graphical display in the full-flight simulator.
BIDDING WARS
For eight specific requirements, the air force will offer monetary credits for a bid that exceeds minimum performance. As an example, one bidder’s total evaluated price is, say, $16 billion. But that bidder offers an aircraft that can perform a 7.5g manoeuvre, even though the air force only requires 6.5g. In that case, the service will reduce the evaluated price for that bidder by $88 million.
In theory, each of the competitors can lower their evaluated prices by up to $688 million by offering training systems that meet objective requirements rather than threshold values. For a contract estimated by the government to cost about $16 billion, that puts a maximum of 4.3% of the contract value in play to trade performance and risk against cost.
The air force’s acquisition experts came up with this approach to address long-standing concerns about competitive fairness. In the Cold War-era, the military would often publish a set of requirements and invite bidders to design new aircraft to meet them. In modern times, the military most often chooses between existing aircraft designs or, as in the case of the T-X contract, a mix of existing and new aircraft.
“This was really intended to normalise something that was a newly developed product versus what was existing and being modified,” says Darlene Costello, principal deputy assistant secretary of the air force for acquisition and logistics.
“We want to make sure we were very transparent about what was valued in the capabilities, so that people didn’t go to invest where they didn’t need to invest,” she says.
The air force did not structure the formula with the goal of preventing a bidder from “buying into” a programme, she adds. In hotly contested military procurements, some contractors have in the past submitted bids that lose money upfront in the development or procurement phase, but perhaps fulfil other strategic objectives.
The stakes in the T-X competition could tempt the bidders to follow that course. Although Weiss endorses the air force’s overall evaluation strategy, he says the credits for exceeding performance thresholds are not high enough to prevent a bidder with a “buy-in” strategy from winning the contract.
In Weiss’ view, the evaluation credits fall short in only one area. The air force is offering to reward the competitors who submit the lowest-risk bid, but offers no credits for being able to deliver aircraft early. By leveraging an existing assembly line for the T-50 in South Korea and an experienced factory in Greenvile, Lockheed has proposed to beat by a year the air force’s schedule target for achieving initial operational capability (IOC) in 2024.
The T-50A derives from work by Lockheed Martin with partner Korea Aerospace Industries
Lockheed Martin
“I would have liked to have seen – it’s not going to change now – better monetisation of rapid delivery of capability. We contend that we’re ready now, ready on day one, and the value of that is huge,” Weiss says.
Leonardo’s campaign is based on a similar theme. Although the company will have to build a new factory in Tuskegee, Alabama, it can deliver the first T-100s from the existing factory for the M-346 in Italy, Lindsley says.
“When you win there’s immediately an immense amount of expectations on both sides – the things you’ve got to do immediately to get going on the programme,” Lindsley says. “So I like to say over and over, we’re just being ready to hit the ground running. We’re running now.”
The upstart in the competition is Boeing. Korea Aerospace Industries first flew the T-50 Golden Eagle in 2002, following a partnership with Lockheed to design an advanced trainer and light-attack aircraft. The first flight of the M-346 as the T-100’s progenitor occurred in 2004, as the result of a design partnership in the 1990s between Yakovlev and Alenia Aermacchi. Boeing had partnered with Leonardo to market the M-346 for some international customers, but decided to pursue a different path for the T-X contract.
In 2013, Boeing announced a partnership on T-X with Saab, which produced major structures for the first two aircraft. The final twin-tailed design became public three years later, just months ahead of first flight in late 2016.
RISK EVALUATION
The air force clearly prioritises a low-risk solution in this competition. The solicitation evaluates risk under five categories, including systems integration, systems engineering, training, operations and support, and technology readiness. If a bidder can earn a “low” risk score in each of the five sub-factors, the air force will give the company up to a $350 million credit on the total evaluated price, according to the solicitation documents.
Unlike its competitors, no version of Boeing’s T-X aircraft is already in service with a foreign operator. Rather than consider that a disadvantage, Boeing argues that it makes its bid the lowest-risk in the competition, because it approached T-X “from the ground up” rather than having to make changes. “The customer was very clear on prescribing what they wanted,” says Connard. “We have delivered exactly what they want to take it to the future.”
Indeed, the air force requirements call for a cockpit size that caused the existing bidders to make small adjustments to the location of control inputs, such as the rudder pedal in the T-50A. Lockheed also added a dorsal aerial refuelling tank and removed the internal gun and weapon stations found on the T-50.
Moreover, Boeing was careful to craft its design to suit the air force’s needs, but without placing bets on risky new technologies. For example, its T-X aircraft features a sidestick controller: a rare – if not original – configuration for the manufacturer. At the same time, Boeing installed passive sidesticks, although the Lockheed F-35 uses an active sidestick and active throttle. Alone among the T-X bidders, the T-50A uses the same type of active sidestick as the F-35. The T-100 is equipped with a centre stick.
All three configurations have evolved over a long series of twists and turns in the T-X bidding process. Leonardo originally partnered with General Dynamics to offer the T-100, but the latter withdrew in 2015. The Italian company next partnered with another US prime contractor, Raytheon, in 2016, but that company also withdrew from the bid a year ago. Finally, Leonardo decided to offer the T-100 by itself, using its US-based DRS Technologies subsidiary to lead the bid.
The air force’s initial requirements for replacing the 430-strong Northrop T-38C Talon fleet immediately disqualified the BAE Systems Hawk T2, driving the design out of contention and forcing BAE’s partner Northrop Grumman to launch a clean-sheet alternative. A year later, Northrop withdrew from the competition entirely, despite designing and flying the Model 400 Swift prototype for a four-month period in 2016.
The contract also drew interest from Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI), which teamed up with Sierra Nevada to consider offering the Freedom Trainer, based on an advanced jet trainer being developed for the Turkish air force. Ultimately, TAI decided not to submit a bid.
In an ideal scenario, the USAF will complete a 14-month selection process in July for a fleet of at least 350 new advanced jet trainers. The losing bidders will refrain from filing a protest, and the winner will get on with the task of achieving the air force’s 2024 schedule for IOC. Future pilots of the F-35 and Northrop B-21 bomber may not, then, have to do much of their training in an aircraft designed during the Eisenhower administration.
The timeline for replacing the 60-year-old T-38C is already years behind schedule. A decade ago, the air force laid out a plan to hit the IOC mark in 2017, but instead shelved the idea for several years, as a group of eager bidders, starved for new contracts involving hundreds of military aircraft, jostled for competitive position.
Source: FlightGlobal.com
