Lockheed may shift F-35 fighter work away from Canada

By: ANDREA SHALAL,  Berlin, Reuters

Top U.S. weapons maker Lockheed Martin Corp is studying whether to shift work on its multibillion-dollar F-35 fighter jet away from Canadian firms amid uncertainty over Ottawa’s plans to buy the jet.

Jack Crisler, Lockheed’s vice president of business development for the F-35 program, told Reuters Lockheed was under pressure from other partner countries that had placed firm orders or accelerated orders to shift more work to them.

In this July 7, 2006, file photo, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is shown after it was unveiled in a ceremony in Fort Worth, Texas.
(Matthew Otero/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)

“This is not anything punitive. It is just business,” he said in a telephone interview from the Netherlands, where the F-35 will fly in its first international air show on Saturday.

Canadian firms will account for development and production work on the F-35 program worth about $1 billion by the end of 2016, Crisler said.

But future work could be in jeopardy if Canada decides to skip a competition and order F/A-18E/F fighter jets built by rival Boeing Co, as indicated by recent Canadian media reports, he said.

A spokeswoman for Canada’s defense ministry said the reports were not accurate, but gave no further information.

Crisler said Lockheed had been unable to secure a meeting with the Canadian government to discuss the issue.

He said F-35 supply chain contracts were competitively awarded in rough proportion to the purchase plans of the nine original partner countries that helped fund development of the radar-evading jet: the United States, Britain, Canada, Turkey, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, Australia and Denmark.

Canada’s ruling Liberals won an election last October on a promise not to buy F-35s because the planes were too expensive. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the House of Commons the opposition Conservatives had “clung to a plane that does not work and is far from being able to work.”

Joe DellaVedova, a spokesman for the Pentagon’s F-35 office, said Canada remained a partner in the $379 billion program, and U.S. officials continued to provide the Canadian government information about the jets as they decided how to proceed.

More than 180 of the new jets are now flying, including an initial squadron of U.S. Marine Corps F-35 jets that were declared ready for combat a year ago, he said.

Crisler said if Canada held an open competition, Lockheed would retain contracts with Canadian firms, but it would need to rethink if Ottawa opted for a sole-source deal with Boeing.

“We are evaluating all that now,” he said. “The most important thing is that we’ve got to protect the enterprise as we get ready to ramp up production.”

However, in a note to clients on Friday, Macquarie analyst Konark Gupta questioned Lockheed’s rhetoric, noting that the company recently awarded long-term F-35 contracts to another Canadian supplier.

“(This) suggests to us that Lockheed could simply be threatening Canada to win an F-35 order,” Gupta wrote.

Sixty Canadian firms had worked on the F-35 development program, and 70 others are now involved in production of the jets, including Magellan Aerospace, Crisler said.

Canadian firms involved urged Ottawa on Thursday to hold a fair and open competition to replace its aging fleet of CF-18 fighter jets. Their supply contracts, they wrote in the joint statement, were contingent on Canada buying the F-35.

“Not selecting the F-35 will set off a chain of events that will see hundreds of millions of investment dollars lost, and high-tech jobs leaving Canada, going to countries who are buying the F-35,” they said.

Lockheed Tells Liberals - F-35 Attractive option for Arctic defence

By: MATTHEW FISHER in Crystal City, Va.
National Post

THE RUSSIAN PRESENCE IN THE ARCTIC IS NOT MYTHICAL. IT RENOVATED 15 BASES THERE IN 2015.

Photo: LOCKHEED MARTIN FILES

Having remained mostly silent during the often overheated debate about Canada’s next fighter jet purchase that took place during the Stephen Harper years, Lockheed Martin has begun to pitch its F-35 as the best choice to defend the vast Atlantic and Pacific approaches to Canada and especially the High Arctic.

It’s no coincidence that Lockheed Martin has stressed the F-35’s suitability for Arctic operations, something that lines up with the Liberals’ focus on asserting Canada’s sovereignty over the Far North, writes Matthew Fisher.

It is probably no coincidence that what Lockheed has chosen to stress about the fifth-generation warplane dovetails with the Liberal government having declared that asserting Canada’s sovereignty over the Far North and the defence of North American airspace were among its security priorities.

It follows a promise from Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan that Canada will conduct “an open and transparent process to replace the CF18s.”

That reverses what the Liberals had said during the election campaign about excluding the F-35 from consideration from what will be a multibillion-dollar contract, no matter which fighter jet platform the federal government buys.

It comes after the Pentagon has said the cost of each F-35 has dropped to US$100 million from $145 million and is expected to dip to about $80 million by 2019.

The high cost of the Joint Strike Fighter had been one of the other major complaints in Canada.

Lockheed’s emphasis on the suitability of the JSF for Arctic operations against manned, unmanned and missile threats was designed to clear up “misconceptions about this airplane,” Billie Flynn, a former RCAF squadron commander who is a senior test pilot on the F-35, said at Lockheed’s offices in a Washington suburb.

The JSF has only one engine, which critics say makes it is too dangerous to fly over the vast northern expanses.

This assessment is at odds with the U.S. decision to base its entire over-the-pole fighter jet defence on the F-35 — as it has done for decades with the single-engine F-16.

Similarly, Norway intends to fly only F-35s above the Arctic Circle. Canada’s other Arctic ally, Denmark, which sometimes sends fighter jets to Greenland, is likely to opt for the F-35 soon, too.

“Think about Air Canada no longer having four-engine airplanes,” Flynn said in explaining why other countries had decided to deploy F-35s in the Far North.

“We fly across the Pacific, the Atlantic and even as far down as Australia in twoengine aircraft. It is the same with fighter engines. There is no need for two engines anymore.”

The F-35 was a better choice for Canada in the Arctic than fourth-generation alternatives such as Boeing’s F-18 Super Hornet, Flynn said, because it had more sophisticated sensors, including passive and active radars that could spot intruders at a greater distance.

“Russia is closer than you think. It is only 840 nautical miles from Alert,” Flynn said, referring to Canada’s top secret air force listening post at the north end of Ellesmere Island. “The Russian presence in the Arctic is not mythical. It renovated 15 bases there in 2015.”

The F-35 has faced hard questions over a potentially dangerous ejection seat, problems with overheating when its bomb bay is open at high altitudes, and software glitches with the helmet and with millions of lines of coding for the jet’s computer, which is meant to fuse information from its radars, infrared cameras, electronic jammers and the computers of other aircraft flying with it.

While acknowledging that there had been challenges, Flynn said they were being resolved. Where there had been about 3,000 “deficiencies,” there were now “419, which sounds like a lot, but it isn’t,” he said.

Flynn said he believed the F-35 was uniquely capable of providing the edge required to counter the “stealthy” jets being developed by Russia and China.

Having “stealth is a matter of survivability. If you don’t have it, you are an RCAF pilot who is not coming home,” Flynn said.

“You need an aircraft that can sense (other aircraft) from a long way away and then prosecute them if and when that is required.”

If Canada were to chose another aircraft, Flynn raised the prospect that the government might have “to leave the country’s Arctic defence to allies” whose F-35s would be capable of dealing with a new generation of lethal long-range Russian missiles such as the S-400, which can strike targets hundreds of kilometres away.

Canada to Remain as part of JSF F-35 Consortium

Undated/Uncaptioned photo of F-35 from The Associated Press

Published by: Steven Chase, The Globe and Mail 

The Canadian government intends to make a payment this spring to remain part of the consortium of F-35 Lightning fighter-jet buyers, despite a Liberal election promise to exclude the aircraft when selecting this country’s next warplane.

The move raises questions about whether the Liberal government is reconsidering its ban on purchasing the controversial F-35 jet.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s party announced during last year’s election campaign that it “no longer makes sense” to buy a fighter with the F-35’s stealth, first-strike capability, citing skyrocketing costs for a plane that has been plagued with development problems. The Liberals vowed instead to buy a “lower-priced” aircraft and funnel the money saved into the Royal Canadian Navy.

This week, however, Department of National Defence spokeswoman Ashley Lemire said Canada plans to pay the latest required annual instalment to the Joint Strike Fighter program. She said the upcoming payment is estimated to be $32.9-million (U.S.)

The contribution would maintain Canada’s membership in the F-35 buyers’ pool. This gives Ottawa the right to buy F-35s at a discount and allows Canadian companies to continue to bid on supply contracts for the plane.

Asked why Canada remains in the Joint Strike Fighter program when the Liberals have eliminated the plane as an option, Defence Minister Harjit Singh Sajjan said the government is still reviewing how it should proceed on replacing the country’s aging CF-18 fighters.

“We can’t just make a very quick decision on something like this. We want to make a responsible decision as we move forward. We have to go through the proper requirements. Once we go through a proper process, decisions will be made at that,” he said.

The annual required contribution to remain in the Joint Strike Fighter program, alongside allies such as the United States and Britain, has varied between $21-million and $48.5-million over the past five years.

Conservative Senator Daniel Lang said the federal government’s decision to stay in the program is puzzling.

“Why would anybody spend millions of dollars to stay in a program they’re not going to participate in?” said Mr. Lang, who chairs the Senate national security and defence committee.

Leaving the Joint Strike Fighter program would hurt Canadian business because companies would no longer be able to bid on contracts to supply parts and software for the plane.

Canadian companies have won more than $750-million in contracts related to the F-35 because Canada has been a partner in the program for decades. Should the Liberals exit the program, Canadian firms’ contracts will wind down and they will not be eligible to bid on further work.

“At this time, Canada remains in the Joint Strike Fighter program, which ensures Canada can continue to benefit from economic opportunities resulting from the partnership while we work to determine the way forward,” the Defence Department’s Ms. Lemire said.

One procurement expert working for the federal government, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said it’s unclear whether Ottawa could successfully defend against legal action should it bar jet maker Lockheed Martin and its F-35 plane from a competition. “They will have to decide whether they want to run a competition or face a lawsuit.… The easiest option for a variety of reasons is to run a competition and run it fairly.”

The Liberals inherit a military purchasing effort plagued by delays and cost overruns, from shipbuilding to aircraft.

“I will be honest with you. Our procurement system is not providing capabilities to [Canadian Forces] members in a timely manner,” Mr. Sajjan told the Senate on Wednesday.

The Trudeau government has created a cabinet committee to oversee defence procurement that will be headed by Natural Resources Minister Jim Carr, who previously served as president and chief executive of the Business Council of Manitoba.