Assembly line for the F-35 fighter’s F135 engine (Pratt & Whitney photo).
UPDATED 6/13/23 at 1:20 PM ET with comment from GE Aerospace.
WASHINGTON — Following the Pentagon’s attempt to shutter the Adaptive Engine Transition Program in fiscal 2024, House authorizers would seek to keep the program alive to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, according to text of House Armed Services Committee chairman Mike Rogers’ markup [PDF] of the FY24 defense policy bill released Monday evening.
The legislation would also authorize funding for the Pentagon’s preferred approach to modernizing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s engine known as the Engine Core Upgrade (ECU). In March, the Pentagon announced it had chosen the ECU, an upgrade to the jet’s current engines, rather than a full-on next-generation replacement that would’ve emerged from AETP.
But under the Alabama Republican’s proposed version of the legislation, the committee would authorize about $588 million for AETP, funding that the Pentagon had zeroed out in the upcoming fiscal year. (In a briefing with reporters, a senior congressional aide said that the budget provided “the president’s request” for ECU but a funding figure was not immediately available.)
The aide declined to comment on whether the authorization signaled that an AETP engine could find its way into an F-35 after all, but said the the funding was specifically geared toward laying the groundwork for a sixth-generation aircraft like the Air Force’s Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter.
“We did the AETP line to keep that technology going as we head into sixth-generation aircraft that the Air Force and Navy are hoping to field in the 2030s,” the aide said during a briefing with reporters on Monday.
Continued funding for AETP would be a major win for GE Aerospace, which has been pushing to keep the program going in the immediate term and lobbied hard for the adaptive engine choice for the F-35. The funding for ECU is also a victory for Pratt & Whitney, a subsidiary of Raytheon Technologies, which backed the approach. Pratt also developed a next-generation engine as part of AETP.
“We appreciate the HASC reaffirming and not delaying the Department of Defense’s decision to support the F135 Engine Core Upgrade (ECU) as the safest, lowest risk and most cost-effective F-35 propulsion solution for the warfighter and taxpayer. No other engine option will ever work on all variants of the F-35 or exceed Block 4 needs starting in 2028,” Jeff Shockey, senior vice president of global government relations at Raytheon, said in a statement.
“We appreciate the leadership of both Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Smith, who recognize the importance of investing today in technology that will provide our warfighters with revolutionary capabilities in the face of growing geopolitical threats — capabilities our XA100 engine stands ready to deliver,” a GE Aerospace spokesman said in a statement.
The funding picture for both engine modernization choices could change as the full committee debates the legislation, which must then be approved by the House and negotiated with the Senate. House and Senate appropriators also control the purse strings, meaning that any funding for AETP or ECU is not certain until the accompanying FY24 budget is approved.
Additionally, after the Government Accountability Office warned that the military services have still not set requirements for key decisions like engine modernization and an upgrade for the F-35’s power and thermal management system, the text of Rogers’ markup indicates House authorizers would mandate them to do so. Authorizers would then direct the F-35 program to use those requirements to carry out a “complete and comprehensive cost-benefit and technical risk analysis” that assesses engine modernization choices and other upgrades under consideration for the aircraft.
The committee would group the various subsystem modernization efforts together to classify them as an individual “major subprogram” of F-35 acquisitions, and is seeking a report on the results of the program’s analysis by July 1, 2024.
