EAST HARTFORD — Although his jet engine program has struggled through high-profile development hiccups and criticism for its price tag, the head of military engines at Pratt & Whitney said Thursday his major threats are forced cuts to the Pentagon’s budget.
And the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s unwelcome reputation as the most expensive Pentagon budget line in history brightens that target on its back at a time that Lockheed Martin and Pratt had hoped to be building far more planes and engines than they are now.
“I am concerned about what the impact could be with sequestration because the program probably would lose some airplanes, and we would love production volumes,” Bennett Croswell, vice president of military engines at Pratt, said Thursday.
The budget President Barack Obama proposed for 2016 calls for 57 Joint Strike Fighters, up from the 38 planned for this fiscal year. But it also blows through the sequestration spending caps that were set in place in 2011, and it is unclear whether Congress will deliver a spending plan that keeps those numbers intact.
The planes-per-year number is important on both sides of the Pentagon weapons buying system. Higher volumes can result in lower unit costs for aircraft like the Joint Strike Fighter, but those volumes require big budget lines, the type that are exceedingly difficult in a time of shrinking defense spending. So the result often is that policy-makers buy fewer aircraft a year at higher prices, which would be further scrutinized.
Production numbers for the F-35 have been lower than initially planned. If the program had gone according to schedule, Croswell said, Pratt would be producing more than 100 engines by now.
And whether it’s a marginally functioning $400,000 helmet for the F-35 pilots or an engine problem that grounds the whole fleet days before they were supposed to make their debut at major European air shows last year, politicians have their choice of reasons to be skeptical about the approximately $400 billion program.
Still, Croswell said he feels that the political pressure is easing. He cites the aircraft’s solid performance launching from — and landing on — the USS Nimitz supercarrier late last year and the milestone operational certification for the Marine Corps version that the aircraft is expected to reach later this year. The cost of the engine, too, has fallen more than 50 percent from its first production models, he added.
Croswell said that orders from 11 other countries are beginning to offset the slower than expected Pentagon orders. Israel, South Korea and Japan have all placed orders for the F-35, and “they live in difficult neighborhoods,” Croswell said.
Pratt & Whitney makes all its engines for foreign customers in its West Palm Beach, Fla., plant, although Turkey and Japan have said they are interested in assembling their own engines before long.
The focus on the new Joint Strike Fighter program at Pratt comes as other major military engine programs reach the end of the road. In January 2013, the final F119 program for the military’s F-22 Raptor aircraft came off the line.
This year will mark the end of Pratt’s engine production for the C-17 Globemaster III. And, Croswell said, next year could be the end of the company’s work on making engines for the F-15 Eagle and F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misspelled Bennett Croswell’s first name.
