Peter Pae of the Los Angeles Times has an excellent piece on the production process for the Joint Strike Fighter, aka the F-35. Pae reports that Northrop Grumman plans to produce one complete JSF fuselage every day, with plans to produce as many as 5,000 aircraft if there is strong enough demand from the Pentagon and foreign governments. December saw a number of positive developments for the JSF program (which I wrote about here), particularly with regard to finding a large export market for the aircraft. Still, 5,000 seems a bit optimistic. John Pike of globalsecurity.org expressed his doubts about the program to Pae:
“How can we afford it?” asked John Pike, a security policy analyst with GlobalSecurity.org in Alexandria, Va.
Pike said the program could face its biggest hurdle in about 10 years, when new unmanned-aircraft technologies and precision weapons, coupled with shifting military strategy, could make the F-35 obsolete.
“The whole idea of tactical aviation like the F-35 was predicated on fighting the North Koreans from South Korea, or fighting the Soviets in East Germany from West Germany, where a short-haul aircraft made sense,” he said.
“We have to look at a future in which we have no allies to base our planes. That means we need long-range bombers.”
Still, the need to subsidize the unit cost through exports seems to guarantee support for the program in the short-term:
The F-35 faces “little cutback risk” in the next year or two, said Cai von Rumohr, an aerospace analyst at Cowen & Co.
“The F-35 represents a major U.S. export potential that could be jeopardized if the program falters, increasing the odds that business would go to European competitors,” he wrote in a note to investors.
The F-35, from Lockheed Martin
