The head of the F-35 program office said Wednesday that the military is working on two solutions to allow lightweight pilots to safely eject from the joint strike fighter, though those fixes are about a year away.
Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, program executive officer for the F-35 program, told members of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces that the military is redesigning helmets to be lighter and adding a switch to set the ejection mechanism for a lighter pilot.
This year, the Defense Department discovered that the ejection seat could give fatal whiplash to pilots weighing less than 136 pounds, even though the seat was supposed to be designed to accommodate pilots weighing 103 to 245 pounds. As a result, lighter pilots are prohibited from flying until problems are fixed.
“This is supposed to be life-saving, not life-threatening,” said Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, and chairman of the subcommittee.
Related Story: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2574118/
Bogdan said the developers have found three problems with the ejection seat, all of which have proposed solutions.
The first solution is to redesign the helmet to make it lighter, Bogdan said. The current helmet weighs 5.1 pounds and developers must reduce that to less than 4.8 pounds to reduce the neck stress of lighter pilots when the seat blasts out of the plane and when the pilots’ head is forced back by a wind blast upon ejection.
Officials have been working for about six months to redesign the helmet, but it will take another year for the military to ensure every helmet weighs less than 4.8 pounds.
The second solution is installing a switch on the side of the ejection seat to allow pilots to set it for light weight or heavy weight when they climb into the cockpit, sort of like being able to turn a passenger air bag on or off. Bogdan said that of the solutions, such as putting a sensor into the seat to automatically adjust for the pilot’s weight, aviators said they preferred this solution to make the pilot responsible for his or her own safety.
The ejection seat problems are just the latest issue that has plagued the F-35 procurement program. The planes are behind schedule, over budget and have had numerous glitches from software problems to issues with the helmet that caused pilots to see a green glow when flying at night.
Despite these problems, Bogdan said the program is “fundamentally on track” and in a better position now than it was a year ago. Bogdan said prices for all three variants continue to drop, and that he believes the military can still achieve the price target of $80 to $85 million per F-35A.
The price per plane could go up, however, if the new Canadian prime minister follows through with his promise to not purchase the 65 F-35s the country had planned to buy. Bogdan said any withdrawal by Canada would not affect the development program, but would make each plane more expensive for the U.S. and other international partners set to buy the planes.
He estimated that if 65 fewer F-35A variants are bought, the price will increase for everyone else by about .7 to 1 percent, or about $1 million per plane.
Turner said that despite problems facing the program, everyone agrees that the F-35 is “absolutely critical to maintaining air dominance.”
