The contractor’s Pratt & Whitney military aircraft unit met the goal for delivering engines last year, but quality deficiencies in “turbine blades and electronic control systems resulted in maintenance activity to remove suspect hardware from the operational fleet,” according to the latest Selected Acquisition Report sent to Congress and obtained by Bloomberg News.
Pratt & Whitney “has taken action to improve quality surveillance within their manufacturing processes,” and manufacturing quality experts at the Defense Department have worked to ensure improvements are in place as production of the single-engine aircraft accelerates, according to the report prepared by Pentagon acquisition officials with help from the F-35 program office.
Pratt & Whitney, the sole maker of engines for the F-35, is under pressure to hone its quality processes as the Pentagon plans to spend almost $49 billion buying as many as 2,457 engines for the fighters built by Lockheed Martin Corp. Congress has approved $6.7 billion in engine funding so far, according to the report. The Pentagon has requested money to buy 63 engines next year, increasing to 105 by 2021.
‘Continuous Improvement’
Pratt & Whitney spokesman Matthew Bates said in an e-mail that its quality management “is designed to ensure safe, reliable products” and the company “is investing significant resources in advanced quality inspection techniques and continuous improvement in our supply base, which has [led] to year-over-year improvement.”
The reliability of installed engines is exceeding 90 percent “which is well ahead of 2020 requirements,” he said. (end of excerpt)
Click here for the full story, on the Bloomberg news website.
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from Defense Aerospace - Press releases http://ift.tt/1RPBr07
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