Author Profile: Syed Aseem Ul Islam is PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA, specializing in adaptive and model-predictive flight control systems. He received his bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the Institute of Space Technology, Islamabad, and his master’s degree in flight dynamics and control from the University of Michigan.
As combat aircraft have gotten complex (especially with the progression to 4+ and 5-generation designs), their lifecycles have become much longer. The wearily long development cycle of the F-35 is well known to many. The development of that fighter began in 1995, yet its first pilots began training on the program 17 years later in 2012. Likewise, the F-22 – which began as the Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) in 1981 – took 22 years to its first production delivery.
Overall, since a country can only fund a finite number of high-cost, high-complexity programs at the same time, the current crop of new aircraft must fulfill multiple roles. Thus, they are equipped with the most cutting-edge systems, which drives up complexity and cost.
Furthermore, because of long development cycles, the eventual end-user requests new systems on top of the initial set of specifications, which leads to delays. In fact, this has gotten more common due to the increased rate of technological advances in recent years.
The long development cycles, coupled with delays, inevitably result in cost overruns. Despite that reality, because these projects are high priority – and with large amounts of money spent already – they become “too big to fail,” and thus, compound the cost overrun issue.
It is a classic case of a snake biting its own tail; these overruns raise the stakes of the project and, in turn, lead to even more exotic specifications to justify the cost and delays.
Finally, since the development costs inevitably balloon, one must distribute the costs over a larger number of aircraft. In turn, the end-user would have to keep these aircraft in service for a longer period to keep the life cycle costs at a justifiable level.
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