by Bill Fawcett
To McNamara, the F-111 was supposed to be the same plane for two different services. It wasn’t working out that way.
To do the Air Force’s low-level supersonic strike, the F-111’s airframe had to be extra rugged. That made it too heavy for the Navy.
As the F-111B prototype went into testing, engineers foresaw its takeoff weight reaching 75,000 pounds—almost the weight of an 18-wheel semi-truck—and it had to be catapulted off of a carrier’s flight deck. The F-111B could only deliver 90 minutes on station when the Navy wanted four hours. It was supposed to carry six Phoenix missiles, each one weighing 900 pounds, adding still more weight. And the advanced electronics needed to track 18 targets simultaneously would kick the plane’s price tag up to $12 million—six times more expensive than the F-4 and twice as costly as the F-111A.
“Lifting devices” were fitted to the F-111B to overcome the extra weight. They increased the nose-up angle of the plane, making it harder for the pilot to see the carrier flight deck while landing. A weight-cutting program accomplished little. It seemed that every improvement the Navy tried to make only resulted in more delay and expense.
The Navy’s F-111B program was out of control. It was three years behind schedule. It was way over budget. And one prototype had already crashed.
Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Thomas Moorer and Vice Admiral Thomas Connelly, chief of naval aviation, both told Congress in 1967 that they did not want the accursed F-111B. The admirals wanted to take the best of its technology to make a cheaper 52,000-pound fighter that could dogfight. (That later became the F-14 Tomcat.)
The Senate Armed Services Committee happily obliged, voting to kill the F-111B.
Senator McClellan won a minor victory and became the F-111’s gravest threat.
Good-bye Nevada, Hello Vietnam
It was now the Air Force’s turn to suffer. In March 1968, six F-111s were dispatched to Takhli, Thailand, to do their share bombing North Vietnam. If all went well, the F-111 would replace the F-105 Thunderchief (a.k.a. “the Thud”). The F-111 was limited to flying nighttime strike missions against ground targets in North Vietnam’s panhandle region, just north of the DMZ.
The first F-111 was lost within four days of starting operations. Radio contact ceased as the plane was on its way to the target area around Donghoi. While North Vietnam claimed it shot the plane down, the Air Force was more skeptical. Said one officer: “We honestly don’t know why the plane is overdue.”
A second F-111 was lost two days later over Thailand. Fortunately the crew ejected and survived. The terrain-following radar and its backup failed, automatically pitching the plane upwards to avoid hitting hills or trees, but too low to give the pilot enough altitude to recover from the resulting stall.
Two days later, a third F-111 did not return, like the first, disappearing while en route to North Vietnam. It took a while for the Air Force to find the wreckage. The probable cause of the crash was a tube of sealant left in the plane by a careless worker. The tube froze solid at high altitude and slipped into the plane’s flight control mechanism, causing it to jam. Some in the Air Force doubted this was the problem. (No more combat missions were flown. The Thailand deployment ended in November 1968.)
In May 1968, another F-111 was lost on a training flight over Nevada, though the crew managed to eject. Later that month, General Dynamics lost a pre-delivery F-111 at an Armed Forces Day air show in New Mexico. That June, the Air Force grounded all 42 of its F-111As.
By August, Air Force inspectors determined that the failure of a six-inch steel rod in a hydraulic valve actuator was the probable cause of the recent crashes. The valve, located in the F-111’s tail, controlled the plane’s elevator. The subcontractor had originally used a $100 one-piece high-strength steel rod in the valve, but replaced it in later models with a cheaper $50 rod made from two pieces welded together. The welds snapped, causing the valve to fail—with fatal results.
While this problem was being fixed, another fault came to light in the summer of 1968. An F-111 wing carry-through fitting cracked in a stress test. The carry-through fitting is a 3,000-pound steel wingbox that runs across the belly of the plane, with pivot fittings on either side where each swing wing was attached. If this fitting failed in flight, the F-111 would lose a wing.
At first Air Force inspectors suspected the crack was caused by improper bolting of the carry-through box to the rest of the plane. But that was discounted after 2,500 bolt holes were inspected throughout the F-111 fleet, finding only one flawed hole. The wing boxes were reinforced to prevent future cracking.
The cracking problem reappeared in February 1969, when another stress test produced a crack that was nowhere near the bolt holes on the carry-through fitting. This flaw would limit the F-111’s service life to about 1,600 hours of flight time, or about four years of normal flying. The wing carry-through box was supposed to have a 6,000-hour life span, allowing for 10-15 years of flying.
Torture testing began on the wing carry-through box in May 1969, simulating 7.33 Gs of force after the structures spent 24 hours at 40 degrees below zero, followed by extensive ultrasound testing to look for cracks. An $80 million program to fix the wing box problem was drafted for all F-111As then in service. This was later readjusted to $40 million of more modest fixes once the stress problem was better understood.
Other problems became public.
The F-111 was supposed to accelerate from 650 to 1,450 mph in 90 seconds, but took four minutes because it was grossly overweight. One solution was to replace the current engines with the more powerful Pratt & Whitney P-100. But the refit was not possible for later models. This would cost $1 to $2 million per plane, kicking up the F-111’s unit cost to the $12–$16 million range
The F-111’s jet intakes were located right below the point where the wing joined the fuselage. Turbulent air bleeding off the fuselage was entering the jet intakes, causing the engines to flame out. Tweaking the intake design didn’t help much.
While the F-111 was grounded, the Pentagon took the knife to the program again, cutting $1 billion by canceling the purchase of the last 40 planes. Sadly, these were to be the F version of the F-111, fixing many of the under-performance problems that the earlier models suffered.
The plane’s deadliest foe (no, not North Vietnam) then took aim at the F-111.
Senator McClellan restarted the hearings he recessed back in 1963. He charged the Pentagon and General Dynamics with hiding the F-111’s problems:
The low-level supersonic range of the F-111 was supposed to be 240 miles. But in reality, its “dash range” was only 35 miles. Engineers forecast the metal fatigue problems that were now afflicting the F-111’s wing carry-through box which meant that the wings were beginning to fall off during flight. Still the Air Force proceeded with the program despite the warnings, first raised in 1967. Boeing wanted to make the wing carry-through box out of titanium, which is lighter and stronger than steel. McNamara had rejected the idea as too radical, too risky, and not cost effective.
Then it was discovered that General Dynamics withheld information from the 1963 hearings that the F-111 design was 5,000 pounds overweight.
Belatedly, McClellan’s committee accused Roswell Gilpatric and Fred Korth of conflict of interest because of prior relationships with General Dynamics, even though the Justice Department had cleared both men of that charge in 1963.
The F-111 contract also had no binding performance guarantees and no penalties for failure to meet performance specifications.
McClellan took his last shot at the F-111 in December 1970, simply by listing the numbers. The U.S. was supposed to get 1,700 F-111s for $6 billion, but instead got only 540 for almost $8 billion, and only the last 100 made came close to meeting performance specifications. By the time the last F-111s were being delivered to the Air Force, the sticker price was hitting $14.9 million.
The pennywise McNamara’s pet plane proved to be dollar-foolish, as his planned $1 billion savings turned into several billio
n dollars of extra expense.
To punctuate the whole mess, another F-111 crashed in May 1971, causing the fleet to be grounded for the sixth time since its service began. The Air Force correctly noted that fewer F-111s were lost in equal amounts of flying time for more well-known aircraft like the F-100, F-101, F-102, F-104, F-105, F-106, and F-4. Then again, all of these aircraft were cheaper than the F-111, which put a real dent in the budget every time one crashed.
“Any time there is anything wrong with the F-111, it’s all over the newspapers,” said F-111 pilot Lt. Col. Robert Morrison. “But believe me, I’ve put in plenty of hours on it and the F-111 can do more things than any other aircraft—and it’s safe and stable, too.”
Pilots who flew the F-111 swore by it.
The critics swore at it.
Vietnam, Libya, Desert Storm
As much as some proponents wanted to use the F-111 to attack its critics, they still needed the plane to bomb North Vietnam.
In the fall of 1972, the Air Force sent forty-eight F-111s to Thailand, hoping the plane’s all-weather night-flying capabilities would negate the winter monsoon that would be hovering over Hanoi. By the end of September, F-111 raids were hitting the rail line running from Hanoi to China. Two were lost on operations in a week—Hanoi claimed the planes were shot down. A third disappeared, flying out of Thailand, with no mayday or distress signal. A skittish Pentagon ordered the F-111 grounded again, but it only took a couple of days to check out the planes and restore them to service.
Throughout October and November, another three or four F-111s were lost, but only one was shot down. This was overshadowed by the downing of B-52 bombers. Until then, none had ever been lost, so each shoot down was bad news on page one. The F-111 became a footnote, receiving some relief from negative press.
By 1986, the F-111’s problem-plagued reputation was largely forgotten. The U.S. launched retaliatory air strikes against Libya after its terrorists bombed a West German disco, killing one U.S. soldier. Carrier-borne A-6 Intruders and 18 F-111s based in the U.K. struck five Libyan airfields and Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s mansion-like tent. One F-111 was lost for unknown reasons, while another five aborted their missions because of system malfunctions.
By now the F-111s were dropping highly accurate laser-guided bombs, a far cry from the radar-automated bomb drops of the Vietnam War. They wiped out a portion of the Libyan Air Force and damaged airbase runways. Still, there was a minor failure rate. Three bombs hit the French Embassy in Tripoli. Another bomb missed an airfield by two miles and hit a farm, killing 300 chickens. Libyan officials were eager to show off collateral damage, but barred Western journalists from seeing any damage done to military targets.
By Desert Storm in 1990-91, the F-111 drew no more bad press. Only the later E and F models of the F-111 were still flying, but they were so thoroughly upgraded that their all-weather capability was well matched with their accurate delivery of smart bombs with laser targeting. Close to 100 F-111s were deployed. Not a single F-111 was lost in about 5,000 sorties flown. The F-111s were used to deadly effect against hardened Iraqi air defense sites, aircraft shelters, and airfields.
The U.S. finally got its money’s worth out of the F-111 before retiring the plane in 1996, replacing it with the near-flawless F-15E Strike Eagle.
Unlike most winged failures, the F-111 did serve long enough to redeem itself. If the U.S. learned anything from the painful F-111 program, it was to break up the most high-tech aircraft contracts into stages. Never again would billions of dollars be spent for a new airplane based on blueprints and specification sheets.
The practice would now be for contractors to fly-off prototypes against each other, with the winner getting the final contract. This way, Uncle Sam would not get the shaft again.
At least we can hope for the best.
“Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.”
—Groucho Marx
A Bone of Contention
The B-1 Bomber
William Terdoslavich
When a plane is a costly failure, don’t change the plane. Change the mission. No matter how many times defense critics and anyone with any common sense have tried to ram a stake through the heart of the North American Rockwell B-1 bomber, it keeps coming back to haunt us.
The B-1 was originally designed in the 1970s to be a high altitude supersonic nuclear bomber. An electronic counter-measures (ECM) suite was supposed to foul the electromagnetic spectrum, blinding any Soviet radar-guided surface-to-air (SAM) missile trying to shoot it down. The B-1’s swing-wing could be set forward during takeoffs and landings, then pulled back for the joyride past Mach 1.
Then cooler heads prevailed.
President Jimmy Carter and his Secretary of Defense, Harold Brown, axed the program. To many, the hatchet job looked like a typical liberal hit, eliminating a weapons system that could maintain the nuclear balance of terror with the Soviet Union in the expensive, ever-escalating nuclear arms race. Conservative critics fumed that Carter was making America weak in the face of its enemy.
While Carter had many inept moments in his presidency, this was not one of them.
There was no point in buying the B-1, at $200 million a pop, when the B-2 stealth bomber was already in development. A more technologically advanced plane, the B-2 was invisible to radar, thanks to the use of non-reflecting composite materials and its sleek design.
But Carter and Brown could not tell off the critics. The B-2 was still a top secret.
Ronald Reagan to the Rescue!
Not being tough enough on Communism was one of many image problems that Carter failed to shake in his re-election campaign of 1980. Ronald Reagan had no qualms exploiting Carter’s weakness in order to win. Reagan kept his promise to revive the B-1, purchasing 100 aircraft for a total program cost reaching $29 billion.
The new plane was rechristened the B-1B, but Air Force personnel nicknamed it “The Bone,” for B-one. It was to be the replacement for the aging 1950s-vintage B-52, only this time redesigned as a low-level bomber carrying nuclear weapons. The prototype B-1B Lancer took off in 1983 and entered service in 1985.
But that pre-empted the B-2 stealth program to a degree. Northrop’s $25 billion project was more revolutionary than evolutionary, delivering not a prototype but the first production model during Reagan’s presidency. Building out the whole run of 132 B-2s would have cost about $200 million per plane—about the same flyaway cost as the B-1. But having both the B-52 and B-1 dampened the need for the B-2. As a result only 18 of the stealth bombers were purchased. The program’s price tag was spread out over the few aircraft made, raising the sticker price to $3.2 billion per plane. (Ouch.)
Maybe all this budget grief would have been for naught if the B-1 had performed as advertised.
It didn’t.
The plane could fly. But its ECM suite could not.
The ALQ-161 was supposed to do for the B-1 what AEGIS did for the United States Navy—provide a means to track multiple threats in real time and select counter-measures to neutralize those threats. AEGIS could successfully track over 120 targets in the air, on the surface and beneath the waves. The more modest ALQ-161 was supposed to protect the B-1 by detecting and tracking up to 50 simultaneous threats in the air. But in actual practice, as soon as the 51st threat appeared on the radar screen, the ALQ-161 shut down. This can be a bad thing when the sky is full of SAM missiles trying to home in on your airframe.
In the early 1990s, the Air Force tried to “rephrase the problem.” The ALQ-161 was now meant to handle only the 11 most serious threats under the banner of “Core ECM.” Yet the ALQ-161 couldn’t even handle that.
Perhaps more galling was the B-1’s non-appearance in the Gulf War of 1990-91.
To be fair, the plane’s proponents argued that the B-1 was already deployed to handle its nuclear mission, and therefore unavailable to drop dumb bombs on even dumber Iraqi soldiers occupying Kuwait.
The plane’s critics, however, poin
ted out that the B-1 was also unavailable at least half the time for its nuclear mission. The Air Force wanted a Mission Capability Rate (MCR) of 75 percent. But the B-1’s MCR usually came in under that number during peacetime, by about 10 to 20 percent.
The Gulf War was the Air Force’s war. And it was never shy about claiming to have won it single-handed. The outcome was going to drive budgets for the next decade.
The START arms control treaty with Russia also called for cuts in the bomber force to accompany the drawdowns in nuclear-tipped ICBMs and SLBMs. The B-1 was going to have to fight for its fair slice of a shrinking budget pie if it was to keep flying.
But how?
When Given a Lemon, Make Lemonade
By 1994, the Air Force decided it was time to reorient the bomber force away from its nuclear mission over to conventional bombing. The B-1 was getting an upgrade program that would allow it to drop dumb and smart bombs. It would need a secure communications package. The Global Positioning System would be added to its navigation suite. And the troublesome ECM system would be upgraded.
“The B-1 has a colorful history,” said the polite and understated Lt. Gen. Richard Hawley, the principal deputy assistant to the assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, in a 1994 interview with Defense Daily. “We’re thus going to have to overcome a great deal of skepticism to persuade people that it can act as the core of our conventional bomber force.” Hawley admitted that the B-1’s electronic centerpiece, the ALQ-161, was still not living up to expectations after hundreds of millions of dollars spent upgrading the system.
Even after the changes and upgrades MCR rates still sucked, and would also effect the B-1’s “cost of ownership.” The 28th Bombardment Wing, based at Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota, got by in 1995 with a 55 percent B-1 readiness rate—about 20 points below the Air Force’s own benchmark. Within six months, the 28th BW managed to raise its MCR rate to about 65 percent by streamlining maintenance procedures. Having more spare parts available boosted readiness another four points. The 75 percent MCR was attainable for the B-1, but only if there was adequate support infrastructure, maintenance crews and spare parts, all factors that had been diminished by past under-budgeting.