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WASHINGTON: In a blow to Britain, the U.S. Defense Department renewed an effort on Monday to cancel a second engine for the world's costliest warplane project.
“They determined to terminate funding for the (second) Joint Strike Fighter engine in FY08,” Maj. Gen. Frank Faykes, the Air Force's chief budget official, said during a Friday briefing embargoed for release on Monday after the president presented his budget request to Congress.
Fiscal 2008 begins on Oct. 1.
The decision to kill an alternate, interchangeable, engine for Lockheed Martin Corp.'s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is bound to run into opposition in Congress, which last year turned back a similar Pentagon effort.
The second engine is being developed by Britain's Rolls-Royce Plc and General Electric Co.
If canceled, the program could be worth $60 billion to $100 billion to United Technologies Corp.'s Pratt & Whitney unit, which is building the initial F-35 engine, Aviation Week & Space Technology has reported.
Faykes said Pentagon officials were seeking to scrap the second engine for the same reason put forward a year ago, to save money for higher-priority projects.
The F-35 is a supersonic, radar-evading, multi-role fighter designed to replace a wide range of aircraft, including AV-8B Harriers, A-10s, F-16s, F/A-18 Hornets and Britain's GR.7s and Sea Harriers.
The British embassy did not return a telephone call seeking comment. Last year, Britain complained about not being consulted on the decision to try to end the second engine.
Rick Kennedy, a spokesman for General Electric, said the company was “disappointed that the Department of Defense is not supporting the congressional direction from last year to fund the competing engines.”
GE has said it would be removed in effect from the market for future large fighter engines if funding for the Joint Strike Fighter alternate engine is ended.
“Is it a massive financial blow for GE? No, but it's a strategic blow, because we won't be in that sector where we've been successful for decades,” Kennedy said.
Pratt & Whitney values “the confidence the (Defense Department) has placed in us and in having one engine provider for the F-35,” said Jennifer Arsenault, a company spokeswoman, in an e-mail.
GE and Roll-Royce are 60-40 partners in the alternative engine development. They say an alternate engine benefits the F-35 program by creating competition and making sure that, if a problem develops with one engine, another is readily available.
The U.S. government has spent nearly $2 billion to develop the second engine so far under a $2.4 billion contract awarded to GE and Rolls-Royce in August 2005.
The United States alone is planning to spend $276.5 billion to acquire more than 2,000 F-35s over the next 20 years. The aircraft is being developed with eight other countries. Britain has already put up $2 billion, the most of any U.S. partner.
(Additional reporting by Bill Rigby in New York)
