Australia’s F-35A Joint Strike Fighter acquisition program took a step further at the beginning of May, with the delivery of major training aids to RAAF Base Williamtown in NSW.
The equipment arrived from the UK aboard a giant Antonov An-124 freighter and included an ejection systems maintenance trainer and a weapons load trainer.
The training aids will be used to support maintenance training at the F-35A Integrated Training Centre now nearing completion at the base.
Further deliveries during the course of this year will include the first two-pilot full mission simulators (FMS), ahead of local F-35A training beginning in 2019 and initial operational capability (IOC) at the end of 2020.
The first two aircraft are scheduled to arrive in Australia in December and they will begin a series of validation and verification testing with local IT and base support infrastructure. Further deliveries of aircraft will occur next year and training will begin to ramp up at Williamtown.
A further milestone in the program occurred in November last year with the rollout of the third Australian aircraft at Lockheed Martin’s production facility in Fort Worth, Texas. This aircraft is also the first of Australia’s 72 F-35As to have its vertical tails manufactured in Australia by Marand, under contract to BAE Systems Australia.
At that time, the Minister for Defence Industry Christopher Pyne announced that more than 50 local companies had directly shared in more than $800 million in production contracts and he said hundreds more were indirectly benefitting through supply chains.
In February the direct amount had grown to $1 billion, towards the target set by the Defence Department for Australian industry participation in the F-35 program of between $6bn and $9bn of production and sustainment work, through to 2050.
Recent local industry success stories on the program include SRC Australia, which won a $17m contract from Defence in September 2017 to supply its Ghosthawk mission support system; and the delivery of the first two of 29 mobile mission support system facilities to the RAAF at Williamtown.
The latter were designed and developed by Varley in Newcastle and will be used to support the trans-Pacific delivery flights of the first two aircraft in December.
Six Australian F-35As have now been handed over in the US and five of these are being used on a daily basis to support international training at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona.
Another four are now on the production line in Fort Worth and it is likely that two of these jets will be the first aircraft to arrive at Williamtown. All bar the first two Australian aircraft, which were handed over in 2014, were delivered with the latest version of software installed, known as version 3F (final). This is the operational version of F-35 software and the first of the two earlier aircraft is now being upgraded in the US.
“We’re certainly focused on the additional capabilities we get with the 3F software. It is a phenomenal capability and a major step up from the earlier version, 3I,” says Air Vice Marshal Leigh Gordon, head of the Joint Strike Fighter Division within the Defence Capability Acquisition and Sustainment Group (CASG). “I think we have now retired a lot of technical risk towards IOC with the delivery of this latest software.”
Further risk is also being retired with regard to the F-35As’ autonomic logistics information system (ALIS), which is a software-intensive support system that manages operations, maintenance and training. The system has previously been tested under local conditions in the purpose-built Off-board Information Systems Centre (OBISC) at Williamtown and the first production version of ALIS has recently been installed in the Integrated Training Centre.
“I think we’re in a good position to start operating the first jets in Australia in December and for training to begin in 2019,” Gordon says. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/na...s/news-story/38d64a2ccbc8869ff379ef34f74a38f3
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