Reuters reported today that GE’s F136 engine will require modifications that will keep it offline for the rest of the year. While speculation about the recent testing failure centered on the combuster for the engine, a GE spokesman said it involves a diffuser that directs air into the combuster.
GE and Rolls Royce are in charge of building the “alternate engine” for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a project that is opposed by the Pentagon, the White House, and defense experts such as The Lexington Institute’s Loren Thompson, who said the following about the testing problems in his blog this morning:
“This issue underscores a logical flaw in the case for an alternate engine. Backers argue that having a second engine is insurance against a design flaw in the primary powerplant being built by Pratt & Whitney for the single-engine F-35 fighter. But that reasoning works both ways — add a second engine to the mix, and you’ve doubled the potential for design issues, just like you’ve doubled the cost of developing engines by having to fund two design teams and two development programs. With several billion dollars remaining to be spent before the alternate engine joins the fleet, there is still time to rethink whether a second engine is really needed. The Pentagon says one engine is enough.”
Citizens Against Government Waste has been speaking out against the alternate engine through its national advertising campaign, by providing an online “Citizen’s Demand” to stop funding the engine, and by direct contact with its members. The combined efforts have produced 13,000 responses in opposition to the alternate engine.
As Congress moves closer to considering the fiscal year 2010 Department of Defense Appropriations Act conference report, CAGW’s lobbying arm, the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste, launched an online action alert asking taxpayers to send an email to their representative and senators urging them to vote against the legislation if it contained funding for the alternate engine. To date, there have been more than 13,000 emails sent to Capitol Hill.
The debate is at a critical stage, as the President signed the Department of Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2010 despite pledging to cut wasteful earmarks and veto the bill if it contained funds for the alternate engine in a way that adversely affected the Joint Strike Fighter program. The authorizing committee got around that threat by simply adding the $560 million in funds for the alternate engine to the bill without reducing the cost of any other program, including the F-35. That cannot be done quite so easily in the appropriations bill.
Loren Thompson made another critical observation about the problems with the engine in his blog, noting that the ”normal failure rate in development of a new gas turbine engine would be on the order of one incident every 300 hours, but GE seems to be having problems every 13 hours. As a result, it may be up to a year behind schedule on its testing plan.”
On Friday, October 30, The Washington Post broke the story that seven members of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee are under investigation by the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, all of it related to earmarks that were requested by the now-defunct PMA Group. The F136 engine could be as much as a $560 million earmark, making it one of the largest in the defense appropriations bill. While this particular program is apparently not tied to the ethics investigations uncovered by the Post, between the ongoing testing problems and the corruption associated with the earmarking process, it should be clear to the defense appropriations conferees that now is the time to pull the plug on the alternate engine and ground it forever.
Filed under: Pork
