Big is Ugly and Expensive

The latest D.O.D. airframe project to be given has gone to Boeing; the MMA will be a Boeing 737 based maritime reconnaissance aircraft. There was only one other US bidder in this competition, Lockheed-Martin offering up a P-3 Orion based solution, a 40 year old airframe design. What is with this situation?

Since the current 1st tier of airframe builders was formed in the late 1990's we have seen a steady decline in the ability of the aerospace industry to think originally. With effectively only three design teams now (Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumman) we, the tax payer, are subject to lack of imagination and price gouging that monopolies effectively create. The fact that only 2 of these companies even manufacture airframes (for anything) anymore, and that only one (Boeing) manufactures large airframes, means that the Department of Defense, that conjured up this situation, is today sitting on a hotbed of total design apathy.

It is interesting to note that with the sole exception of the Global Hawk UAV, not one of the operation UAV systems fielded by any service comes from the big three aircraft manufacturers. The imagination and originality needed to come up with breakthrough systems no longer exists in the big boys. This is further reinforced when we look at the JSF program and the mess Boeing got into with it's submission - this project may well have been won by Lockheed-Martin purely on a beauty contest basis, the Boeing aircraft look like one of the ugliest aircraft in decades! Design has to encompass function, but original design also addresses the esthetic - though style may not help in dropping bombs, it still influences people when they think of a career as a pilot or an aircraft fitter. The military still needs people, no matter what the futurists would like to think.

The rational in having all these companies merge was that they would be better able to build the sort of aircraft numbers the Airforce and Navy were expecting when they started the F/A-22 and the JSF (F-35) projects. The reality is that the F/A-22 is a shadow of its original projected size (700+ expected, 230+ budgeted), and that JSF will be built by so many parts suppliers that its hard to say who actually will build the aircraft. We would have been better off if the Pentagon and DOD had got out of their Cold War mindset and looked at the possibility of designing many new solutions, building shorter runs of some of these and accepting that they would have many design houses using many suppliers. The UAV situation has gone down this path. We have many UAV design houses, and the supply of parts for these is orchestrated through many parts suppliers, in a practical sense because none of the design shops have all the manufacturing needs at their disposal, nor do they want them.

And UAV's are still pretty cheap! Having lots of design houses and lots of smaller runs does not have to lead to more taxpayer pain.

The D.O.D. needs to look at how to break up the current few mega aircraft companies and look at how a manufacturing base capable of producing the aircraft they really need can function with an broad, aggressively independent, and re-energized design cadre.