In late April, two weeks after reassuring the world that the JSF was on schedule and that its costs had gone down, JSF program bosses told their customers that development will probably be stretched by another year, a move that would likely add several billion dollars to development costs. See full report here.

On April 8, as reported here, the JSF program office and prime contractor Lockheed Martin held a press conference and issued a release to trumpet the Pentagon's 2007 Selected Acquisition Report (SAR) numbers, which showed an overall decrease in program costs. "The F-35 program is on schedule," the release said.  

At the press conference, Pentagon program manager Gen. Charles Davis criticized a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, issued in March, which - among other things - said that three other government agencies predicted that systems development and demonstration (SDD) for JSF would take a year and several billion dollars longer to complete than scheduled. "We do not agree with that estimate, there is no basis for that estimate, and we do not support it," Davis said.

Two weeks after that media event,on April 22, Davis and other program managers told the top-level JSF Executive Steering Group, at a meeting in the Netherlands, that the SDD program will probably be extended by a year. The decision is expected to be formalized in the fall.

The delay was revealed by the Netherlands Ministry of Defense in a letter last week. (Relevant passage on page 2.) Neither Lockheed Martin nor the JSF program office responded to an email requesting clarification.

A one-year delay would put the completion of operational testing for the Block 3 configuration in late 2014, about 18 months after the fighter is due to reach initial operational capability (IOC) with the USAF. Under the most recent schedule, the Marines are supposed to declare IOC in the second quarter of 2012, after tests of the Block 1 configuration are completed, but with a one-year delay the latter event won't happen until the end of 2012.

Incidentally, the capabilities included in Block 3 were quietly redefined in 2006, as discussed in a Pentagon acquisition journal. Block 1 "allows meaningful operational test" but even Block 3 includes only "limited objective functionality."

The delay is not surprising because at least two critical segments of the program are visibly behind schedule. Short-takeoff, vertical landing tests have been delayed by engine problems, and the CATBird avionics testbed is not expected to fly with mission systems until the end of 2008, six months later than was predicted two years ago.

The Netherlands government gives no direct indication of the impact of the decision on program costs. However, a previous one-year extension to the program was blamed for a $7.5 billion direct cost increase, according to the 2004 SAR.

A delay will also affect production. Full-rate production under a multi-year contract is supposed to start with an FY2013 contract (with deliveries in 2015), but normally full-rate production is not authorized until SDD and testing are complete, so low-rate initial production will likely be extended and delayed. With a delay, current production plans would call for 576 aircraft to be on firm order before OT is completed, and it is unlikely that such a risky, concurrent plan would be accepted.

The delay also explains the timing of plans to present a multi-year, multinational JSF procurement plan to the eight international partners. As reported earlier, no formal offer will be made until the end of the year, after a formal decision is made on the SDD delay.

Although our story quotes Dutch defense ministor Jack de Vries as optimistic about the program and critical of the GAO report, it should be noted that his comments about costs concern production costs, while the GAO was focused on SDD. Also, he's quoted as saying that “the F-35 will not be more expensive to operate than the F-16." This may be true but it is not good news, since the F-35 was supposed to cost less to maintain than older aircraft.