GE-Rolls Cleared For More JSF Engine Tests

LOS ANGELES — General Electric and Rolls-Royce have been granted a two-week breathing space by the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) to continue tests of the endangered F136 Joint Strike Fighter alternate engine. GE-Rolls says the JPO “has enabled us to find a way to stretch the funding” for continued testing of the F136 until Dec. 17, the date earlier indicated as a possible extension by the development team. The change was made possible, the JPO says, by the program execution to date. “The JPO has modified the contract accordingly, and there is no indication that a stop-work order will be issued,” GE-Rolls adds. The JPO extension coincides with the termination of the current continuing resolution (CR) funding the effort, which was itself extended on Dec. 1. The short-term change in the CR allows the U.S. government to operate at 2010 funding levels until around Dec. 18. However, the longer-term survival of the F136 remains dependent on whether it is included in a new omnibus funding bill, now in the works in Congress (Aerospace DAILY, Dec. 2). Meanwhile, GE Aviation President and Chief Executive David Joyce says his company has asked the U.S. Defense Department to throw down the gauntlet to Pratt & Whitney over the fixed-price terms it is offering for Lot 4 low-rate initial production (LRIP 4) engines based on the terms offered by GE-Rolls. “We invited the Pentagon to take our prices to Pratt and see if they can match them. That’s how the commercial engine business is done,” Joyce says. “We’ve put two fixed-price proposals in for LRIP 4 and one this year for all the other LRIPs (5 through 7), which was fixed price with year-to-year deflation built in. The effect of both of these was to make more people know there was an alternative to the cost-plus mentality. We could start the competition as early as they wanted,” Joyce says. One provision of the fixed price contract that may require negotiation could be in the area of metal prices, over which neither GE-Rolls nor Pratt has any control. “We should have some shared risk on that because we do not control the metal market,” Joyce suggests. Still facing cancellation of the alternate engine program at what he considers to be in the final stretch of development, Joyce says: “The decision to throw away $3 billion of taxpayers’ investment when you are a year away from flying, and hand a single-source, $30 billion deal to Connecticut makes very little sense in any way. Keeping both options is guaranteed to drive down the cost of the engine. Guys that support us are on a mission to stop out-of-control spending. I still might not win a single engine but I am the control mechanism — it’s the single most expensive part of the airplane.” Joyce also reacts angrily to the reported assumptions of “learning curve” expenses automatically being built into projected funding for the JSF engine. Although the Defense Department’s business case study claimed the F136 will cost $2.9 billion between now and 2016 to complete, a subsequent Government Accountability Office review discovered more than $700 million in “lost learning” was assumed by the department if the government had to fund two engines. “There is no entitlement in a learning curve. On big weapons systems there is a dialogue to be had; but when you have 3,000 engines and a potential monopoly, you can’t say you are entitled to a learning curve,” Joyce says. “The data we’re seeing for these engines give us a high level of confidence in our competitive position on performance and cost. We’re not philanthropic — we do an analysis of the underwriting risk and look at the engine testing results, which give us a high level of confidence in the [engine] design. So, we’re ready to go [competing early production engines]. We feel pretty good about our position, and we want to argue the merits of the case.”