Alternate history: Boeing won JSF

[Scott Kenny]

I never liked winner takes all. F-32 proceeds minus EODAS and EOTS? I think that is a terrible idea. JSF needed to key in subsystems separate from the base airframe to make this alternative feasible. NG simply had a much better big picture design irregardless their airframe choice literally looks nothing like X-35. Same issue with the ATF winner, the F-23 would have been a simpler design to build and maintain, but NG won the competition on the overall big picture design. F-23 with MAW, 2D tvr, and the bombbay innovations that were in F-22 would have not been possible in the winner takes all outcome.

F-32 only makes sense if you scrap F-32B and allow NG to proceed with F-35B as the -B winner and as a competitor against F-32C for future orders. That way USAF and USN end up with F-32A and F-32C, but USMC is able to choose its own JSF offshoot. F-32B was simply a loser by design. It had no chance. But F-32A and F-32C really needed the goodies found in the F-35 program to justify their existence. I know everyone loves supercarriers, but the USN really would have benefitted from distributed airpower in cruisers with STOVL and expanded helicopter hangar packages. Losing a supercarrier is basically losing $100 billion in one swoop, whereas hybrid cruiser carriers would probably be 1/10th of that. The biggest difference is no longer treating carriers as mobile islands for extended operations. That required relinquishing prolonged bombing campaigns to the USAF and a reduced number of supercarriers. Not sure we still aren't headed that route as both supercarriers and LHDs are ill equipped to fight future drone wars.

Smaller carriers are grossly less capable than the big ones. FFS, the QE-class have HALF the air wing of a Nimitz, despite being ~3/4 the displacement.

 

[MadRat]

If the platform they sit on cannot survive a future war then you fought the wrong war.

 

[stever_sl]

It's mentioned in one of the JSF threads on here that the original idea for the X-32 programme was to fly a couple of prototype ASTOVL systems. LM had the shaft driven fan, MDD had a gas driven fan, and I think someone else had a third candidate system. The idea was that after testing, there'd be a competitive design phase for a production aircraft (CALF?) using the preferred system.

But when it turned into JAST, LM had exclusivity on the shaft driven fan, and the gas driven fan didn't work. Which left lift engines or vectored thrust for Boeing and MDD/Northrop/BAe to pick from. And as it turned out, the shaft driven fan was a better fit to the requirement.

I worked MDC's ASTOVL (after our brilliant Harrier 21 alternative got crushed by internal politics) and we were acutely aware from our own studies, as well as just ordinary common sense, that the shaft-driven lift fan (SDLF as it was known then) would produce a lighter, faster, cheaper configuration than anything that could be done with the gas-coupled lift fan (GCLF) but we were forced to go with the latter when the Government gave the SDLF award to Lockheed and made us take the GCLF. There was tremendous frustration in our group, and for awhile our management considered Company funding for doing an SDLF design in parallel with the GCLF one, but at Corporate level it was decided that we had to just go with what the Government had given us. We suspected something fishy at the time but had no idea that the whole ASTOVL was nothing more than a cover story for the secret program with Lockheed that DARPA and later the Services had been funding for years, to mature critical STOVL technologies, specifically the lift fan. So it was always planned that Lockheed would have years of risk reduction to bring to the eventual JAST/JSF competitions, and it worked out perfectly for them in the end. For years the whole ASTOVL story was kept on the government's own JAST/JSF website, and luckily for historians those pages have been preserved here, if anyone wants to read about it: https://web.archive.org/web/20061112005516/https://www.jsf.mil/history/his_prejast.htm

 

[danwild6]

Considering the major malfunctions Boeing has had since they were defeated in the JSF Competition, I do not see how they could possibly have made a success of the X-32. Their three most public failures being the 737 Max, KC-767, and Starliner along with the CEO leaving under the 737 Max cloud. Terrible examples of "Wrong Stuff".

Yeah it's a damn shame they let McDonald-Douglas merge with Boeing that's were a lot of the company's problems come from.

 

[stever_sl]

Yeah it's a damn shame they let McDonald-Douglas merge with Boeing that's were a lot of the company's problems come from.

That merger was over a quarter of a century ago. If Puget Sound management couldn't fix any incoming problems in that length of time, it's a shocking revelation of their own weakness and incompetence. It's always convenient to have someone to blame things on, but after awhile the excuse wears pretty thin. (Full Disclosure: I retired from Boeing in 2016 and watched the entire collapse from within. The former CEO from PS wrote one of my recommendation letters for becoming a Technical Fellow. I know what I'm talking about! )

 

[danwild6]

I'd agree they've had plenty of time to sort this out but management culture has a habit of continuing in a certain direction for decades until radical change i.e. Jack Welch at GE (not entirely positive direction for the company).

 

[Scott Kenny]

That merger was over a quarter of a century ago. If Puget Sound management couldn't fix any incoming problems in that length of time, it's a shocking revelation of their own weakness and incompetence. It's always convenient to have someone to blame things on, but after awhile the excuse wears pretty thin. (Full Disclosure: I retired from Boeing in 2016 and watched the entire collapse from within. The former CEO from PS wrote one of my recommendation letters for becoming a Technical Fellow. I know what I'm talking about! )

Was there any management at Boeing that came from Puget Sound after the merger? I was under the impression that all the Boeing engineers in Manglement were forced out for MDD types.

 

[Rule of cool]

Could it have been called the Corsair III or Crusader II because of its chin intake? Who decides the name, DoD or the manufacturer?

 

[Ainen]

Smaller carriers are grossly less capable than the big ones. FFS, the QE-class have HALF the air wing of a Nimitz, despite being ~3/4 the displacement.

It is more about UK being poor/unable to afford aircraft.
QE itself was designed for 36+4 fixed-wing aircraft (meaning F-35s), i.e. closer to 4/5 of Nimitz airgroup. But this is not a dense carrier; CdG can carry(and employ) 2/3 of Nimitz airwing in <1/2 her size.

The problem isn't how much aircraft they can embark (or even operate), it's probably more how effective/straining it is. But American supercarriers are best possible/least compromised designs, rather than most effective in, for example, a WW2 sense (send out largest possible attack waves as cheaply as possible and hope for the best).

 

[Desertfox]

What i want to know is what happens in a world where the Marines get Harrier 21 and the USAF gets a clean McD design as F-24, what does the Navy do? Does F-32/35 get the chance to becomes the next F-17 or does the Navy get F/A-XX much earlier?

 

[Scott Kenny]

What i want to know is what happens in a world where the Marines get Harrier 21 and the USAF gets a clean McD design as F-24, what does the Navy do? Does F-32/35 get the chance to becomes the next F-17 or does the Navy get F/A-XX much earlier?

IIRC the plan was NATF and ATA/A-12. 2 squadrons of each.

 

[Desertfox]

IIRC the plan was NATF and ATA/A-12. 2 squadrons of each.

Wouldn't both have been canceled by this point? Or would no JSF allow NATF to survive?

 

[Ainen]

Wouldn't both have been canceled by this point? Or would no JSF allow NATF to survive?

NATF was long dead. A/F-X - sure, though it'll be 3 new programs...I highly wonder if USMC somehow gets to keep theirs.
Lockheed will probably go down this way, rather than MD.

 

[Scott Kenny]

Wouldn't both have been canceled by this point? Or would no JSF allow NATF to survive?

Depends on when the decision was actually made to do Harrier 21 and F-24 instead of CALF. Because remember, the original plan was USAF and USMC on a joint design while USN got a bespoke one. So this assumption of all 3 services getting bespoke airframes is a bit of a stretch, unless we assume the USSR didn't collapse?

But okay, let's assume that everyone is getting bespoke airframes, and the MDD A-12 remained a fustercluck of a program that was shanked in 1991.

Tomcat 21 plus A-X evolved into A/F-X, IIRC 3 squadrons per wing, maybe 4. Depends on what the replacement plan for Legacy Bug was. The ATA carrier wing was 2+2.

The hardest justification is Harrier 21 versus X-35, I think. That shaft driven lift fan is way too much of a game changer for VSTOL. So either it needs to have a lot of trouble or it needs to be obscenely expensive to implement. Too expensive by cold war standards.

 

[zen]

Or maybe the secret funding to LM on shaft driven lift fans gets exposed and the other companies including BAE Systems and RR tendering to the requirements, hit the roof publicly.

 

[Scott Kenny]

Or maybe the secret funding to LM on shaft driven lift fans gets exposed and the other companies including BAE Systems and RR tendering to the requirements, hit the roof publicly.

Yes, that'd do it.

 

[zen]

The lawsuits would be epic!

 

[Scott Kenny]

The lawsuits would be epic!

Possibly enough to bankrupt Lockheed. And would make the MDD A-12 lawsuit look like a sneeze.

 

[stever_sl]

Was there any management at Boeing that came from Puget Sound after the merger? I was under the impression that all the Boeing engineers in Manglement were forced out for MDD types.

I think my head is going to explode. After the merger we seemed to have nothing BUT heritage Boeing managers running St Louis ops. JSF was a good example. I was in a foreign technology monitoring group in SL at the time of the merger, and very soon I was "recruited" out of that group to help fill a problem area that Seattle was having in their JSF proposal team. It was done entirely without coordinating with my SL manager; the first he heard of it was when I told him. PS then proceeded to run roughshod over SL, basically saying "if you knew so much, why were we the ones who beat you in Phase 1?" and then after we lost the final downselect to Lockheed, I went back to my home group. Our function was to provide specialty engineering and analysis to groups that didn't necessarily have the budget to keep full-time specialists of their own. But PS kept sending senior managers to run our programs and organizations despite the fact that those managers had never had experience with military customers and kept trying to press processes and tools that we had spent decades refining for those customers into more of a "commercial world" shape. The catastrophes that befell execution of contracts like KC-46 are well known, but there were a lot of proposals that went into the crapper too without ever seeing the light of day in the press. So the cross-fertilization between PS and SL was a long-running train wreck for both sites, and SL is only now showing signs of recovery, 30 years later. At least that's my view from the trenches. Interesting footnote: That initial 1997 grab by PS for my services put me working under someone who would eventually become CEO of Boeing, so you just never know who to be nice to in the junior management chain.