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Pratt & Whitney has changed its proposed upgrade path for the F135 engine powering the F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter. It is now offering two stages of improvements over a four-year period, compared with the three-stage, 10-year plan ending with a completely new engine that it revealed a year ago. The stages are labeled Growth Option 1.0 and 2.0 and include greater thrust, lower fuel burn, and better thermal management.
Matthew Bromberg, president of P&W Military Engines, told AIN that since last year, P&W has combined the informally labeled “Growth 1A” thrust-increase option for the F-35B STOVL version within the overall Growth Option 1.0 package. This package offers 10 percent more thrust than the F135’s current nominal 40,000 pounds and 5 percent better fuel burn. But for the F-35B, P&W is working with Rolls-Royce to also provide a 5 percent increase in vertical thrust during the hover.
P&W previously described Growth Option 2.0 as an all-new production engine that would result from its adaptive-cycle research and development under the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory Advanced Engine Transition Program (AETP). Both General Electric and P&W are working on engineering, manufacturing, and development (EMD) contracts from the Pentagon for the AETP, which could power a sixth-generation fighter aircraft.
However, Bromberg said that Growth Option 2.0 for the F135 could now provide the F-35 with “a significant increase in power and thermal management capability” within four years, rather than being a completely new engine design, which might not be available until a decade hence.
P&W is offering the new optional package as a result of the perceived need for an improved power and thermal management system (PTMS) to accompany the upgrades to the F-35 that Lockheed Martin is proposing. Lockheed Martin describes these as a continuous capability development and delivery (C2D2) strategy, but some are also known as the Block 4 upgrade. The upgrade program is scheduled to begin next year but is still under negotiation by the F-35 Joint Program Office.
The Growth Option 2.0 upgrades will result from P&W’s adaptive-cycle R&D effort focusing on third-airstream capability, adaptive-cycle controls, and new materials, with the company planning to “take the technologies as they mature and insert them into existing engines,” said Bromberg. “It’s a whole suite of technologies; we will look at everything. We’re leveraging the bleed systems, the integration system, and the control system.” In addition to the adaptive-cycle fan’s third airstream, P&W is also “looking at adaptive elements in the controls, the components, and the core,” he said.
The result will be a Growth Option 2.0 development strategy that will offer “low-risk EMD” and which “does not add to the four-year Growth Option 1.0 EMD program at all,” said Bromberg. “We are just adding the PTMS requirements into [the] Growth Option 1.0 [development timeline] to meet all the C2D2 requirements.” In fact, he added, once launched, the Growth Option 2.0 EMD program will be even less than four years if customers “look only at sub-options.”
Describing the Growth Option 2.0 upgrades as “a menu of options under the adaptive umbrella,” he confirmed P&W will tailor the package to each customer’s requirements for particular PTMS enhancements. Bromberg said the company will make all the optional Growth Option 2.0 upgrades available to international customers for the F-35, as well as to the aircraft’s U.S. operators.
Buoyed by what Pratt & Whitney executives see as the company’s best-ever period for business growth and having recently won a $2 billion contract to build 135 more F135 engines for the F-35 Lightning II fighter program, P&W Military Engines has unveiled a raft of initiatives aimed at slashing the sustainment costs for its in-service powerplants and cutting in half the cost and time required to develop new engines.
Matthew Bromberg, president of P&W Military Engines, said that with some 7,000 military engines—more than half of which are F100s powering fighter aircraft such as the F-16—and 8,000 military auxiliary power units in service throughout the world, the company saw a need to establish a dedicated military-engine sustainment organization. It recently did so under the leadership of Kevin Kirkpatrick, an engine-sustainment expert whose expertise in the area comes in part from experience he gained working in the P&W Commercial Engines sustainment business.
As senior v-p of sustainment for P&W Military Engines, Kirkpatrick has introduced three initiatives that Pratt & Whitney believes can together improve military-engine maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) turnaround time for its customers by 30 percent as the new programs mature.
One is the creation of a $2 billion inventory of military-engine spares that will be made available to customers on an off-the-shelf basis to go part-way to solving the problem that the military “contracting cycle is slow,” particularly for spares provisioning, said Bromberg. Second is an MRO-management digitalization initiative that P&W calls the Digital Depot. Third is a military engine fleet-management program MRO-management structure that the company calls Fleet Command.
While establishing the $2 billion shelf holding of spares is a significant investment for P&W Military Engines, “We’re loading material we know we’re going to sell,” said Kirkpatrick. The investment “is a number that’s required to keep them [the customers] flying and a number that applies across the board to [P&W Military Engines] international customers” in addition to its major U.S. customers. The amount also “allows us to go out five years or more, depending on the supply base,” in ensuring adequate spares provisioning for customers’ replacement requirements. As part of the initiative, P&W Military Engines is working with the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency and U.S. Air Force “to do some more commercial-like contracting initiatives” in an attempt to speed up the military contracting process for spares, Kirkpatrick said.
The Digital Depot and Fleet Command initiatives are complementary. Fleet Command is an effort by P&W Military Engines to collect all of the engine condition monitoring data its engines produce in operation and analyze the accumulated data for each engine type to allow P&W to provide its customers with predictive maintenance information and also to provide them with MRO services on an airline-type fleet-management basis across their entire fleets of P&W engines.
“We have been tracking data off our engines for a decade,” said Bromberg. “The F135 collects 20 times more data per flight than previous engines.” Having so much condition and performance data available from each engine every time it flies makes predictive maintenance on a fleet-wide basis possible and makes a fleet-management program a logical, efficient way of managing MRO scheduling throughout the fleet.
By digitizing many other forms of engine condition and MRO data obtained during the MRO process, the P&W Military Engines Digital Depot initiative will also allow P&W to provide its customers with predictive-maintenance advice and information. “It gives us a bunch of data and helps us look at predictive maintenance a long time in advance,” said Bromberg. “We have some very real, near-term actualities which might be smaller but are [happening] right now.”
One Digital Depot project launched by P&W Military Engines in June with the F135 Heavy Maintenance Center at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City is a program to develop a paperless MRO records system. A second project recently launched by P&W Military Engines at the F135 Heavy Maintenance Center is creating digital scans of every blade and vane airfoil in every U.S.-operated F135 engine. These digital scans will let maintenance inspectors know what needs attention on any given airfoil in an engine on which MRO is being performed, according to Bromberg.
GatorWorks
Another major initiative P&W Military Engines has launched is GatorWorks, a new unit set up outside Pratt & Whitney’s mainstream business and R&D operations with a specific remit to cutting by half both the cost of developing a new military engine—or a project that forms part of the engine’s overall development—and the development time required.
Bromberg said that prompted by the U.S. Department of Defense, P&W recognized its biggest military customer needed more agile, quicker-reaction engine development capability than the traditional 20-year development cycle can provide. P&W also knew the template for such a capability has long existed—for 75 years, in fact, in the form of Lockheed Martin’s famous Skunk Works rapid-innovation, rapid-development unit. It appears hardly coincidental that P&W regards its first adaptive-cycle project as having been the J58 turbojet engine’s variable-position inlet cone, the J58 being the engine P&W developed in the late 1950s for the Lockheed A-12 Oxcart and SR-71 Blackbird, two of the Skunk Works' most innovative and most famous development products.
Employing fewer than 100 people in what Bromberg said is a small organization with a team-development ethic, the GatorWorks operation is located in a separate facility near or in the grounds of P&W’s vast production and engine-testing facility about 10 miles northwest of West Palm Beach, Florida. (The Skunk Works connection was responsible for P&W setting up its West Palm Beach operation in the first place: P&W established the facility in the 1950s to test the J58 engine and located it deep in the Everglades, a long way from any areas of habitation, because of the enormously loud noise the engine made in the open air.) P&W decided to locate the aptly named GatorWorks operation in the West Palm Beach area so that it could leverage the considerable industrial base established there over the years by P&W and various suppliers, according to Bromberg.
P&W has established GatorWorks to use intra-P&W or external suppliers, whether existing or new to the company, to obtain the maximum in cost and timing efficiencies from commercial-enterprise capabilities in rapid prototyping (particularly additive-manufacturing), iterative design, procurement, and testing, in developing and testing new engine designs or parts of new engines.
Unlike the way a traditional engine design and development organization is managed, P&W is requiring GatorWorks to meet a set of development milestones by defined deadlines for each project on which it is working. If GatorWorks fails to meet a deadline on any development milestone for a project, P&W will not fund that project any further but instead will have GatorWorks move on to a new one. GatorWorks was established last year with four projects to accomplish initially, with P&W selecting the four from an initial list of 10 proposed projects.
Characterizing the secure-facility GatorWorks operation as a driven team “working in a garage,” Bromberg said P&W gave the unit only three operating rules: 1) Make use of any element of P&W’s intellectual property required; 2) Don’t hurt anyone; and 3) Don’t break any laws. P&W invested “a significant amount of money, but small to Pratt & Whitney [investment] overall” to establish GatorWorks and set up its four initial projects, said Bromberg. “It’s significant enough money to get the projects moving along.”