US Defense Department, Lockheed Wrap Up Discussions on Ninth Lot of F-35 Jets

The Pentagon said on Wednesday that after 14 months of negotiations on the more than $6.1 billion deal, the U.S. Department of Defense and Lockheed Martin Corp ended talks on their ninth contract for F-35 fighter jets.

The unilateral agreement on the deal for 57 of the new warplanes will provide profit margin certainty to Lockheed and its partners. They have been producing the jet under a placeholder arrangement known as an “undefinitized contract action”.

People acquainted with the contract discussions who spoke under condition of anonymity said the tenth production contract, which is a 94-plane deal, was still under negotiation.

Lockheed said in a statement that the contract was not a mutually agreed upon contract. It was a unilateral contract action, which requires them to perform under standard terms and conditions, and earlier agreed-to items. Moreover, they said that they are disheartened with the decision by the government to declare a unilateral contract action.

However, people familiar with the purchasing process said that the unilateral resolution was uncommon.

The prior lot of 43 planes, lot 8, had an average unit price of $108 million per plane. Planes in lot 9 are about $107 million per plane, 3.7 percent lower. Hence, it is the lowest price per jet thus far.

The F-35 is the Pentagon’s most expensive arms program. The U.S. Department of Defense looks to spend $391 billion to develop the plane. It plans to buy 2,443 of the stealthy, supersonic warplanes, in the coming decades.

The ninth batch of jets includes 42 F-35 A-model jets for the U.S. Air Force, Japan, Israel and Norway; and 13 F-35 B-model jets, which can manage short takeoffs and vertical landings, for the Marine Corps and the British navy. This is in addition to two carrier-variant F-35C jets for the U.S. Navy.

Lockheed, and its key partners including Northrop Grumman, Pratt & Whitney and BAE Systems, have been building and developing F-35s for the U.S. military and 10 allies.

The price of the F-35A conventional takeoff and landing version of the jet would fall to under $100 million per plane in the 10th low-rate production batch, Jeff Babione, Lockheed’s F-35 program manager, had earlier said.

 

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China Shows Off J-20 Stealth Fighter At Country’s Biggest Expo

For the first time, China showed its Chengdu J-20 stealth fighter in public on Tuesday as it opened the biggest meeting of aircraft buyers and makers with a show of its military power.

In the southern city of Zhuhai, Airshow China provides Beijing an occasion to display its ambitions in civil aerospace. Moreover, the country gets to highlight its developing capability in defense. China is primed to surpass the U.S. as the world’s foremost aviation market in the next decade.

Two J-20 jets zoomed over luminaries, industry executives and hundreds of spectators assembled at the show’s opening ceremony. The flypast barely exceeded a minute. The jets produced a deafening roar that the crowd greeted with applause and gasps. It also triggered car alarms in a parking lot.

Planespotters first saw the J-20 in 2010. Experts say China has been polishing designs in the hope of reducing a military technology gap with the United States. As China takes a more assertive stance in Asia, President Xi Jinping has pressed to reinforce the armed forces, specifically in the South China and East China seas.

“It is clearly a huge step forward in Chinese combat capability,” said Aviation Week’s Bradley Perrett, a veteran China watcher.

Further, state-owned Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC) was confident on China’s appetite for new civilian planes. The company projected that the market would necessitate 6,865 new aircraft worth $930 billion over the next 20 years.

The COMAC forecast – comparable to long-term viewpoints from well-established rivals Airbus Group and Boeing Co – said China would contribute almost a fifth of worldwide demand for almost 40,000 planes over the next two decades.

After screaming onto the Zhuhai stage as a pair at low-level, one of the J-20s quickly vanished over the distance. It left the other to perform a series of turns, baring its delta wing shape against bright sub-tropical haze.

It was China’s second consecutive demonstration of stealth at the biennial show, after the 2014 debut of the J-31.

J-20 capabilities remain vague

However, experts said the fleeting and relatively cautious J-20 routine, wherein the pilots did not perform low-speed passes or open weapon bay doors, answered few questions.

“I think we learned very little. We learned it is very loud. But we can’t tell what type of engine it has, or very much about the mobility,” said Asia Managing Editor of FlightGlobal Greg Waldron. “Most importantly, we didn’t learn much about its radar cross-section.”

A crucial question is whether the new Chinese fighter can equal the radar-evading properties of Lockheed’s F-35, the latest strike jet in the U.S. arsenal, or the Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor air-to-air combat jet. The F-22 is the J-20’s closest lookalike.

But the mere exhibition of such a newly created aircraft was a telling signal, others said.

Sam Roggeveen, a senior fellow at the Sydney-based Lowy Institute said that it’s a shift in tactics for the Chinese to openly show off weapons that aren’t in full squadron service yet. It shows a lot of confidence in their ability, and also a lot of pride.

 

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