Pratt & Whitney says the “probable cause” of fan-blade damage during ground testing of the F135 engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter was a worn bushing a part in the fan inlet case causing an aerodynamic disturbance that led to a piece of the tip of a first-stage fan blade breaking off.
A “minor modification” will be incorporated immediately in all initial service release (ISR) production engines “with little or no impact on cost and schedule,” the company said during a teleconference Sept. The blade tips will be clipped off at their trailing edges to remove the area susceptible to damage, a solution Pratt describes as “standard industry practice” Blade damage occurred 2,455 cycles into a 2,600-cycle durability test—at the equivalent of eight years of in-service operation and 5 hours into an 11-hour supersonic high-cycle fatigue test designed to excite vibration of the fan blades via throttle transients. Tear-down of the engine revealed all of the bushings were degraded.
The ISR engine for production F-35s has lighter “second-generation” integrally bladed rotors in the two-stage fan. F135s powering flight-test aircraft have a first-generation fan that has already passed durability testing, Pratt says. The F-35 Joint Program Office and Lockheed Martin have previously said no effect to flight testing was expected.
General Electric and Rolls Royce Sept. 1 pitched Pentagon officials on a plan under which the companies would sell the U.S. military F136 engines for the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) through a fixed-price contract, Defense News has learned. Russ Sparks, GE Aviation’s vice president and general manager of military systems, and other GE and Rolls brass huddled this afternoon with Shay Assad, director of the defense
procurement, acquisition policy and strategic sourcing, and Marine Corps Maj. Gen. David Heinz, JSF program executive officer. Assad is a top adviser to Pentagon acquisition chief Ashton Carter.
The companies presented Assad and Heinz with what Sparks called “a new business plan” for the F-35 alternative engine effort, under which GE and Rolls would sell the military more than 100 F136 units using a fixed-price, not cost-plus, contract for delivery between 2013 and 2015. Sparks said the proposal, which the companies have been discussing with the F-35 program office for several months, would pare the price tag and shift more risk on initial production engines to the GE-Rolls team.
Part of the GE and Rolls officials’ pitch for using a fixed-price contract is to allow the Pentagon “to show a greater return earlier” by inserting a new level of competition the lower price of the first 100 or so F136s - into the JEF engine effort. If the GE-Rolls engine initiative is kept alive long enough by the Pentagon and Congress, it is slated to enter a head-to-head competition with the Pratt & Whitney power plant in 2014.
The winner would be delivered to DoD in 2016.
Sparks said GE-Rolls F136 officials have concluded that the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s “issue is not with building a second engine - it’s with the current business case in a time of other pressures on the defense budget."We're going to give them a different view with a new business case based on a fixed-price contract,” Sparks said. “We are trying to align ourselves with the desires of both the administration and the Congress.”
President Barack Obama has singled out the alternative engine program as wasteful and unnecessary several times during public comments about finally bringing about Pentagon purchasing reforms.
But Sparks said the president and other administration officials also have endorsed using fixed-price contracts more often in place of cost-plus award fee deals, which routinely allow contracts to rake in millions or billions above the initial contract value when costly design changes are made. GE and Rolls officials hope that a switch to a fixed-price arrangement would keep alive the F136 program while allowing all sides to claim victory.
General Electric (GE) and Rolls-Royce have opened talks with U.S. defense officials on a fixed-price contract offer for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) alternative F136 engine that they hope will be a bellwether for the government’s acquisition reform goals by forcing a similar reaction from incumbent F135 engine supplier Pratt & Whitney (P&W). The contract plan, first revealed in Aviation Week, covers several options including a fixed price offer for around 100 engines in the low-rate initial production Lots 5 and 6. “What we finally offer will be led by the Pentagon,” says a GE spokesman, who adds the gambit is
designed to “force Pratt & Whitney’s hand. We’re hoping they’ll react with a fixed-price deal of their own.”
GE and Rolls-Royce say that should P&W respond in like manner, it will spark competition on costs ahead of the first Lot 7 buy originally scheduled to be openly contested between the F135 and F136 engines. “We think this could accelerate the whole program and generate savings well before 2016,” GE adds. Under initial acquisition plans, GE and Rolls-Royce claimed potential savings of up to 20 percent could be feasible, but only two years or so after Lot 7 was due to be contested in 2014.
The meetings, which took place on Sept. 1, included JSF program executive officer Marine Corps Maj. Gen. David Heinz, Shay Assad, director of the defense procurement, acquisition policy and strategic sourcing, and Russ Sparks, GE Aviation’s vice president and general manager of military systems. GE Rolls-Royce meanwhile acknowledges that the second F136 development engine, 625-005, is being inspected in Evendale, Ohio, after ingesting a test sensor. The engine, which had run for around eight hours when the incident occurred, had been “running well, and had reached maximum speed with zero problems,” the GE spokesman says. The engine was shut down “when a reading on one of the sensors went haywire,” he says.
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