The US Air Force has proposed a reliability improvement plan for Lockheed Martin's AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, but has not yet followed through on a threat to cancel the troubled programme.
The USAF submitted the plan to boost the reliability of the stealthy cruise missile on 27 June for review by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which is expected to make a decision before the end of July.
The move follows the air force's threat to cancel the Lockheed contract unless the company agreed to pay some of the costs to improve testing reliability by 17 percentage points to at least 75%. In flight tests to date, the missile has compiled a record of 39 successes and 25 failures.
Lockheed officials have not disclosed their response to the air force, but the company said in a 28 June statement that it "recognises that additional time is required to finalise the plan forward". However, it added: "We are confident that such a plan will evolve and we look forward to proceeding with flight tests of the system as early as September."
The USAF submitted its reliability improvement plan despite not knowing the root cause of the most recent test failures. A series of test flights in late April and early May were marred because the missile lost contact with the GPS navigation signal.
As of late May, air force officials believed the cause of the GPS drop-out issue could be caused by the placement of the antenna for the selective availability anti-spoofing module (SAASM) on the weapon. But the independent review team investigating the problem still "has not identified the root cause of the navigation errors", says the Air Armament Center.
The SAASM antenna is also installed on the Boeing Joint Direct Attack Munition, Boeing Small Diameter Bomb and the Raytheon Miniature Air Launched Decoy. "The review team reviewed each system and at this time has not identified a correlation of the JASSM GPS drop-out issue with other weapons," the air force says.
Source: Flight International