Lockheed Touts Fix for F-35 Fuel Dump

Lockheed Martin has found a way to fix the F-35 Lightning II’s fuel dump system, eliminating a potential fire hazard, a top company official said.

“We expect to have that configuration change back in the test airplane early this year,” said Tom Burbage, Lockheed’s Joint Strike Fighter program manager. “The permanent modification that will go into all the production airplanes will be tested by the second quarter of this year.”

The current test aircraft fleet has an interim solution installed, Burbage said.

In conventional aircraft, fuel can be dumped through a mast that ejects the fluid away from the aircraft’s surfaces. But to keep the F-35 stealthy, the design pumped fuel out forcefully from a valve that is flush with the wing, Burbage said. This design allowed a portion of dumped fuel to move back toward the aircraft’s structure. On the Marine Corps’ F-35B version of the aircraft in particular, the fuel could flow too close to the roll-post ducts, part of the short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing system, and potentially ignite.

The problem came to light in a November report to acting Pentagon procurement czar Frank Kendall compiled by the Defense Department’s top operational tester, J. Michael Gilmore.

"Attack on Iran would be catastrophe " says Russia

MOSCOW — Russia on Jan. 18 said a military strike on Iran would be a “catastrophe” with the severest consequences that risked inflaming existing tensions between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov also accused the West of trying to suffocate the Iranian economy and incite popular discontent with new sanctions such as a proposed oil embargo.

“As for the chances of this catastrophe happening, you would have to ask those constantly mentioning it as an option that remains on the table,” Lavrov said when asked about the chances of military action.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak had earlier said his country was not even close to deciding to attack Iran over its nuclear weapons program and still believed that a military option remained “very far away.”

Lavrov told an annual foreign policy briefing that the chances of war were too dire too contemplate because they would incite intercommunal tensions in the region and flood neighboring countries with Iranian refugees.

“I have no doubt in the fact that it will only add fuel to the fire of the still-simmering Sunni-Shiite conflict. And I do not know where the subsequent chain reaction will end, Lavrov said.

“There will be large flows of refugees from Iran, including to Azerbaijan, and from Azerbaijan to Russia. ... This will not be a walk in the park,” he said of possible military involvement.

Lavrov added that punitive sanctions aimed at winning more transparency from Iran had “exhausted” themselves and only hurt the chances of peace.

“Additional unilateral sanctions against Iran have nothing to do with a desire to ensure the regime’s commitment to nuclear non-proliferation,” Lavrov said. “It is seriously aimed at suffocating the Iranian economy and the well being of its people, probably in the hope of inciting discontent.”

His comments came as European Union diplomats closed in on a July date for a full oil embargo that would suit nations such as Italy with a strong reliance on Iranian supplies.

Lavrov said Russia had evidence that Iran was ready to cooperate closely with inspectors from the United Nations IAEA nuclear watchdog and was preparing for “serious talks” with the West.

He also hinted that Europe and the United States were imposing the measures with the specific purpose of torpedoing new rounds of talks.

Russia has been one of the few world powers to enjoy open access to senior Iranian leaders and on Jan. 18 hosted its Supreme National Security Council deputy chief Ali Bagheri.

The Iranian embassy said Bagheri would hold talks with Lavrov and discuss the option of resuming nuclear negotiations with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany.

Moscow was also due to receive Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar on Jan. 22 for talks focusing on domestic security issues and drug trafficking.

Tehran’s ambassador to Moscow for his part said he expected Russia’s support to continue because it too was being threatened by the West.

“We expect Russia not to agree to a deal with the West,” Iranian Ambassador Mahmoud Reza Sajjadi told the Interfax news agency.

“If there are (non-Western) countries that want to see Iran become a victim of the West, they must understand that the West will get to them too,” said Sajjadi. “We hope that the Russian government and the Russian people will take note of this.”

Syria accuses Qatar of arming Rebels

DAMASCUS, Syria — Syria’s state-owned media on Jan. 18 accused Qatar of arming and financing opponents of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Qatar’s call to send Arab troops to the country “falls within the framework of the negative role played by Qatar since the start of this crisis... through the financing of armed groups,” the Tishrin newspaper charged.

The Gulf state “can help Syria get out of its crisis ... by stopping its financing of armed (groups) and the trafficking of weapons” to insurgents, wrote the daily.

Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Hamad Ben Khalifa al-Thani, said in an interview that he backs sending Arab troops to Syria, where the regime has been trying to crush a democracy protest movement with brutal force for the past 10 months.

Arab League Secretary General Nabil al-Arabi said the idea could come up for discussion at the next meeting of the pan-Arab body at its Cairo headquarters on Jan. 21-22.

The Arab bloc is expected to discuss the future of its widely criticized observer mission to Syria, where the United Nations says the regime’s crackdown on protests has cost more than 5,400 lives since March.

Damascus routinely blames the violence in Syria on “armed groups” and “terrorists” backed by foreign powers pursuing an agenda of regime change in the country.

Tishrin also accused Qatar of blocking any solution to the crisis in order to “ramp up international pressure” on Damascus.

The daily also accused Qatar of “manipulating information” on Syria through its satellite television channel Al-Jazeera.

The accusations come one day after Damascus flatly rejected Qatar’s proposal to send troops to Syria.

“Syria rejects the statements of officials of Qatar on sending Arab troops to worsen the crisis ... and pave the way for foreign intervention,” the foreign ministry said.

“The Syrian people refuse any foreign intervention in any name. They will oppose any attempt to undermine the sovereignty of Syria and the integrity of its territory,” the ministry added.

F-35C Tailhook Design Blamed for Landing Issues

Lockheed Martin has traced the U.S. Navy F-35C Joint Strike Fighter’s troubles with catching a carrier’s arresting gear wires to the tailhook design.
Efforts to fix the problem are well underway, a top company official said.
“The good news is that it’s fairly straight forward and isolated to the hook itself,” said Tom Burbage, Lockheed program manager for the F-35 program. “It doesn’t have secondary effects going into the rest of the airplane.”


Moreover, the rest of the design of the tailhook system, which include the doors and bay that conceal the device and other ancillary hardware, is sound, Burbage said.
“What we are trying to do is make sure that we got the actual design of the hook is optimized so that it in fact repeatedly picks up the wire as long the airplane puts itself in position to do that,” he said.
A preliminary review has already been completed and was done in conjunction with the Naval Air Systems Command and F-35 Joint Program Office.
Burbage said the hook system is already being modified in accordance with the new test data.
“We’re modifying the hook to accommodate what we found so far in test,” Burbage said. “The new parts, we expect to have them back in the next couple of months.”
Tests with the newly modified tailhook should start at Lakehurst, N.J, in the second quarter of this year, Burbage said.
That will give the F-35 program another set of data to study to make sure the new design works as promised. However, until those tests are done, there is no ironclad guarantee that the redesign of the tailhook will work, but Burbage said he is confident of that the modified design will be successful.
“The big test for this airplane is not until the summer of ’13 when we take the Navy jet out to the big deck carrier and do actual traps at sea,” Burbage said.
Burbage dismisses claims that the F-35C will be unable to land on a carrier as falsehoods.
“That’s patently not true,” he said.


Richard Aboulafia, an analyst at the Teal Group, Fairfax, Va., said the claim that the F-35C could never land on a ship was always highly dubious.
“They turned the YF-17 into a carrier plane, why couldn’t they correct carrier-hook problems here?” he said. “This does not appear to be a killer problem.”
Flight testing is designed to uncover and fix problems with a new aircraft, Aboulafia said.
“This is the kind of problem that might come out during the flight testing of a carrier-based plane,” he said.
Aboulafia added that the F-35 is an extremely ambitious program with its three variants — technical problems are par for the course.
The reason the problem with the hook arose in the first place is because of the inherent constraints of building a stealth fighter, said Burbage. The F-35 is the first naval stealth fighter and as such, Lockheed had the unique challenge of designing the jet with a tail-hook that had to be concealed when it’s not being used.
Because the tail-hook has to fit within the outer mold line of the F-35, the device had to be fitted further forward on the jet’s ventral surface than on other naval aircraft, Burbage said. The result is that the hook behaves differently than on previous fighters like the F/A-18.
In an ideal world, an arresting-hook will catch a wire 100 percent of the time, however in the real world that doesn’t happen due to various dynamic forces, the veteran former Navy test pilot said.


In the case of the F-35, one of those dynamic forces includes the way the wires react when the jet passes over them. The wire reacts in a sine wave pattern, Burbage said. “The time differential between when the main gear rolls over the cable and the time the hook picks up the cable on a more convention airplane, there is more time for that wave to damp out,” he said. “In the case of the F-35, one of our design constraints is that hook just has to be closer to the main landing gear than on a conventional aircraft because of the requirement to hide it inside the airplane.”
Another factor that effects landing on a carrier is the sheer force of the impact from a carrier landing. Unlike conventional land-based aircraft, naval aircraft don’t flare on landing. While the landing is on a more precise spot, it causes the tail-hook to oscillate vertically- which increases the chances that it won’t catch a wire, Burbage said. The dampening of that motion has to be tweaked, he said.
The shape of the hook itself also has an effect on the probability of catching a wire, he added. All of these are being tweaked to increase the chances that the F-35C will catch a wire on a carrier’s deck.
“We’re doing a redesign of the hook to increase the probability the hook will engage the wire a high percentage of the time,” Burbage said.

EADS Chief: French Support of UAV ‘Encouraging’

HAMBURG, Germany — The French Defense Minister’s preference for a broad European scope to a planned Anglo-French medium-altitude long-altitude UAV was a positive sign for EADS, Chief Executive Louis Gallois of the European company said Jan. 17.

“You have seen Mr. Longuet was pushing for a program with other European countries, including Germany and Italy,” Gallois told journalists on the sidelines of a joint New Year’s press conference by EADS and Airbus, here.

“I think it’s encouraging for us to push the way we’re pushing,” Gallois said.

Defense Minister Gérard Longuet told the French aerospace press club Jan. 9 the Anglo-French project “should accept the construction of Europe.

“We can’t ignore countries with industrial capabilities. We’ll probably have an Anglo-French project which cannot avoid opening to other European partners,” Longuet said.

France would not develop the EADS Talarion Advanced UAV, Longuet said.

Gallois has urged the British and French governments to open up a proposed new MALE UAV to include EADS and other European partners, to avoid a repetition of the Eurofighter Typhoon versus Rafale dogfight which has divided European industry into an internecine battle for foreign sales.

“Talarion is a prototype, it’s not a final project,” Gallois said.

A top priority for EADS in its talks with the governments of its “home countries” was to preserve research and development capabilities through the launch of new program, made possible by cuts in some defense orders, Gallois said.

The Talarion UAV was a potential for such new program support, he said.

EADS is waiting for a decision from the German government for a go ahead with Talarion, a company spokesman said. EADS has some 160 engineers working on UAVs and is funding the work on company money. In the face of defense budget cuts in Europe, one of EADS’ priorities for 2012 was to increase export efforts and grow its “global footprint,” Gallois said.

The company was also in talks with home country governments, particularly Germany, on “existing and valid” military contracts, he said.

Germany has said it wants to cut the orders for Tiger attack and NH90 transport utility helicopters.

“We have to discuss with them,” Gallois said. “We have our interest to defend regarding workload in our facilities, profitability, future of the product, the balance between Germany and other countries “We include in that the possibility to be part of new programs which could be financed with part of the savings on quantities. It means we are open to discussion,” Gallois said.

“As always, we want to have that decision as quickly as possible as we don’t like uncertainty,” he said.

EADS and Finmeccanica signed a deal in December to team on UAV development, reflecting wider discontent in Italy and Germany over the Anglo-French defense accord reached on Nov. 2, 2010.

The planned Anglo-French MALE drone was one of the projects included in the bilateral treaty. BAE Systems and Dassault have formed a joint venture to bid for the joint UAV program.

Airbus: A400M Interim Service Deal Expected Soon

 

An Airbus A400M takes off at the Toulouse-Blagnac airport in Blagnac, France last October. / Pascal Pavani / AFP via Getty Images

HAMBURG, Germany — Airbus expects to reach an agreement on an interim service contract for the A400M airlifter in a matter of weeks, Fabrice Bregier, chief operating officer of the European aircraft maker, said Jan. 17.

Talks with France for a maintenance contract have dragged on for months. In October, French procurement chief Laurent Collet-Billon to threatened to withhold payment if a service support deal was not ready when the first transport aircraft is delivered to the air force.

“We hope to finalize in the coming weeks,” Bregier said at a joint Airbus-EADS press conference here.

Bregier said the initial deal would be an interim agreement to be extended to the full fleet for Britain and France, the first countries to take delivery of the four-engine A400M aircraft.

The talks have been complicated by difficulties between prime contractor Airbus and the companies in the Europrop International (EPI) engine consortium, French Defense Minister Gérard Longuet said Jan. 9.

“On engine maintenance, everyone is looking at everyone else and wondering what risk he can reasonably take on,” Longuet told the French aerospace press club.

“What we want is a global service agreement with someone who signs and assumes an undertaking,” Longuet said. “On the other side, companies are looking at each other and saying this is going to cost a fortune in lawyers and experts.”

Airbus Military, a subsidiary of Airbus and EADS, makes the A400M. EPI builds the plane’s TP400-D6 engine. The EPI consortium includes ITP of Spain, MTU of Germany, Rolls-Royce of Britain, and Snecma of France’s Safran group.

EADS CEO Louis Gallois said earlier the A380 superjumbo airliner and A400M programs “are now on track.”

Those programs would help boost EADS’ profitability in 2012. Higher aircraft deliveries, improving prices, cost-savings programs and ambitious profitability targets at the division level would also help, he said.

Under a revised scheduled, France is due to take delivery of the first A400M in 2013, with Britain to follow in 2014. Airbus Military hopes to ship the French aircraft by the end of this year, ahead of the contracted date.

France announced at the Paris Air Show in June a memorandum of understanding to cover A400M maintenance, with common support to be shared by Britain and France. Germany has made its own national arrangements for service.

India Hopes To Unveil Fighter Deal in 2 Weeks

NEW DELHI — India hopes to unveil within two weeks the winner of a $12-billion fighter jet deal for which France’s Dassault and the Eurofighter consortium are on a final short list, the air force said Jan. 17.

“Right now we have to do the selection for who is going to be the short-listed vendor,” Indian Air Force chief N.A.K. Browne said in New Delhi. “I am hopeful that in another two weeks time, we will be able to short list the name,” Browne told reporters on the sidelines of a military function, the Press Trust of India news agency reported.

The contract is one of the biggest under consideration in the global defense aviation industry at the moment.

The air force chief said final commercial negotiations would only start after India announced the lowest bidder.

Officials say “life-cycle” maintenance costs of each plane will determine the winner of the deal. The contract is for the outright purchase of 18 combat aircraft with another 108 to be built in India with options to acquire more.

India last April cut out U.S. bidders Boeing and Lockheed Martin as well as dropping Sweden’s Saab AB and the Russian makers of the MiG 35 from the race.

Such a large order attracted intense lobbying during visits to India last year by U.S. President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

India, the biggest importer of military hardware among emerging nations, issued the request for proposals in 2007 and trials of aircraft from the six companies competing for the deal began a year later.