Top Air Force leaders are still expecting the F-35A to reach its initial operating capability on time, despite Congress blocking the service's move to retire older aircraft – the primary source of manpower to maintain the new stealth jet.
The F-35 Joint Program Office has said the F-35A needs 1,100 trained maintainers for the jet to reach its initial deployable milestone in late 2016. The bulk of these airmen were set to come from those currently maintaining the A-10. With Congress blocking the service from retiring the ground attack jet, those maintainers will not be available for the F-35. Despite this roadblock, the Joint Strike Fighter is expected to stay on its current timeline.
"I believe the F-35 [initial operating capability] will be as scheduled, between August and December of 2016," Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh said Jan. 15 at a State of the Air Force briefing with reporters. "I've seen nothing that changes my opinion of this."
F-35 Joint Program Office executive Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan said in October that he was worried that the Air Force might not be able to make the deadline of Aug. 1, 2016, because of the manpower issue. The manpower problem is an Air Force issue, Welsh said, and he is confident the service could prioritize its staffing to meet the goal of initial operating capability.
"The maintainer issue is not an F-35 program issue, the maintenance issue is an Air Force problem," Welsh said. "We have enough people to prioritize this to the point where will be able to get to IOC."
While the service should have enough maintainers to make the deadline, the details on how it plans to fill up the maintenance ranks will not be releasable until the president signs off on the fiscal 2016 budget proposal, expected early next month. Welsh said the service has been working with Congress on how to get maintainers into the F-35 schoolhouse, along with other ways to address the shortfall. If these plans are not agreed to, however, the schedule could be at risk.
"If the proposals we come forward with are not agreed to, then OIC is at risk," Welsh said. "We are now to the second set of solutions beyond what we thought was the best military approach, because we haven't been allowed to take that. We don't have a thousand extra maintenance people looking for a job. They are doing other work, we have to get them into a new platform by taking them out of something else."
The service could also hire contractors to help address the gap, provided the funding is available.
"We think we're getting close to a solution, which is anything but a perfect solution," Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said, speaking about the plans in the 2016 budget. "It presumably would leverage a little bit of flexibility we were allowed in Congress, leverage a number of different factors."
There aren't enough of these experienced maintenance people to go around for all of our needs, and that is why this is so difficult."
The initial operating capability date of 2016 means the F-35A will be able to deploy with a limited capability, based on an updated schedule first planned in 2001. The most important date, Welsh said, is when the F-35A will reach full operational capability, meaning the jet will be able to use all of its weapons and fly in full combat with its complete software suite. This is not expected until after its most advanced software version, block 3F, begins to come online in 2017.
