Happy New Year, by the way!

A Happy New Year to all - here's wishing everybody the very best for 2015.

Innovation and Innovativeness

Innovation at its core is the implementation of change.  The ‘Innovativeness’ of an organisation or individual is a measure of their willingness to embrace all the possibilities of change.

An innovation isn’t necessarily an invention. It is something that’s new in its context – and that could be an invention, developed and applied to some practical purpose. More often that not, however, it’s something that already exists, used or applied in a new way. For example, airline pilots now use iPads in the cockpit to display maps, flight information and checklists. This has been an important innovation in the evolution of modern airline operations, but it wasn’t necessary to re-invent the iPad to achieve this.

Some innovators are naturally restless – for them, change is a constant and the steady state represents stagnation. But most individuals and organisations are not similarly driven. They are naturally conservative and risk-averse and the prospect (not to mention the process) of change is often troubling to them. They need to learn why and how to innovate. The ‘Why’ is simple: external change happens continuously. If you don’t adapt to change you’ll die, eventually. Either you’ll be crushed by external forces, or you’ll wither because the market has changed and you didn’t adapt – you didn’t identify and pursue the opportunities created by that change process. The ‘How’ is equally simple, though ‘simple’ doesn’t mean the same thing as ‘easy’.

All that is required to be innovative is to be aware of the imperative to change, and to be able to manage the change process.

It’s that ‘Awareness’ that is crucial: Self Awareness is about the innovator’s ‘internals’ – it tells the innovator what he’s capable of, or prompts him to ask if what he’s doing is all that he can do; and it tells him what he needs to change if he wants to do more, or do something quite different.

Situational Awareness is all about the ‘externals’: what is happening externally that may force a change, or that might present an opportunity? What is happing with technology, or the economy, or market conditions, or customer behaviour?

The two feed each other. The level of the innovator’s Situational Awareness determines his ability to expose and identify threats and opportunities; the level of the innovator’s Self Awareness will determine the nature of his response.

Challenge: Response; New Challenge: New Response. It’s an iterative process made fruitful if the innovator is sufficiently self-aware and has made a sufficient investment in his situational-awareness. Knowledge resulting from Situational Awareness will stimulate insights in Self Awareness, and vice versa.

The exact nature of any response to emerging insights - the opportunities and threats, essentially – resulting from the Innovator’s Self Awareness and Situational Awareness will be conditioned, and possibly determined, by the innovator’s Technical Mastery. 

No person or organisation exists in a vacuum: whether we’re talking about a charity, a government department, an elite sportsman, a star entertainer or a manufacturing company, the innovator’s activities almost always centre around a specialist domain that it must understand intimately – this is Technical Mastery.

In the case of an elite sportsman, for example, the domain is his chosen sport: its laws, the skills and physical and mental attributes required for success. In the case of a government department there might be more than one central domain: the portfolio itself – defence, perhaps, or housing, or health – and the arcane processes and the checks and balances of the parliamentary system. For the manufacturer it is the technology at the heart of his market, the technology embodied in his products and services, the manufacturing techniques that create saleable products and services, and the supporting and enabling technologies that allow the players in this market to survive and flourish.

A person or organisation wanting to be innovative needs a systematic approach to nurturing and if necessary growing Self Awareness, Situational Awareness and Technical Mastery. In a practical sense, the leaders and the internal culture they help create will determine how welcome and valued each attribute is within the organisation. Good managers will also create the internal processes and mechanisms and nurture the skills and specialist expertise necessary to exploit the insights they gather.

This ability to maintain an organisation’s openness to change, on the one hand, while managing its everyday activities as efficiently and economically as possible, while also developing timely responses to threats and opportunities, is a function of managerial and leadership excellence – call it Professional Mastery. This embraces business management, administration, human resources (recruitment and retention of the right people with the rights skills, and training where appropriate) and strategic planning. This applies to the lone innovator as much as it does to a large, complex organisation.

So, it can be seen that an innovator requires each of these four attributes in order to have any chance of sustained success: Self Awareness, Situational Awareness, Professional Mastery and Technical Mastery. Each informs and is shaped by the others. None of these four features of the successful innovator can survive in isolation, and none of them would be very useful if they could: they would lack either a purpose – in the case of the first three – or direction, in the case of the fourth. Their mutual dependence can be shown in a simple diagram.

The four attributes of an innovative organisation

Their relative importance will wax and wane as an organisation passes through the business cycle. All are essential, but Professional Mastery will help determine where the balance needs to be struck at any one time.

AWD difficulties

I've just been reading the summary of the ANAO report on the Air Warfare Destroyer (AWD) project, along with Cameron Stewart's comments on the report in today's 'The Australian' (7 march 2014).

I agree with Cameron that adverse perceptions of the AWD project and of Australian industry's capabilities could impact severely on the Future Submarine project, Sea 1000. But I don't resile from the central thrust of my previous post (see below): the new submarine will be a developmental project and should be treated as such in a contractual sense. It shouldn't be compared with, and crtainly not treated like, the AWD project.

From what I have read so far in the ANAO report on the AWD project, this became a bit of a developmental project as well, at least so far as design variations to suit Australian standards and design rules are concerned. That sort of thing doesn't help, particularly when the contracting methodology is based on a fixed-price contract.

Furthermore, the process of transferring production technology and know-how from Navantia to the Australian shipyards contracted to build the hull and superstructure blocks seems to have embodied the same difficulties that Vickers Supermarine encountered in the 1930s when outsourcing the manufacture of wings for the Spitfire (see my post from last year). These difficulties weren't hard to predict if you knew something about shipbuilding and understood the subtle but quite significant detail design changes required to suit RAN requirements.

If we as a nation want to sustain and grow a naval construction industry, there is no substitute for actually building ships and submarines to build the technical and management skills required for the industry to prosper.

Oh, by the way: Andrew Davies from ASPI posted a blog recently on ASPI's 'The Strategist' about COTS versus developmental naval projects and I have half a mind to respond to it directly. His basic argument, that the ADF is better off buying an off the shelf solution than if it buys a 'bespoke' design, works if you accept a linear relationship between expenditure and effective capability. Unfortunately, this isn't necessarily the case: choosing to spend 20% less on your submarines, for example, by acquiring an off the shelf design won't necessarily give you 20% less capability. Capability isn't a commodity - you don't buy it by the yard or pound. If you consider the user requirement to be met when you arrive at a certain pre-defined threshold of operational capability, then anything below that threshold is by definition 'incapable' and therefore useless. Paying 80% of the price of a fully capable submarine is no saving if the submarine you get instead is not capable. In fact, it represents a waste of money. You're better off either paying the price for the capability you need (and managing a highly complex developmental project, with all the challenges that involves), or not spending the money at all. (Of course, it helps if the user requirement is properly thought out.)

Discussions on cost and capability need to acknowledge this fundamental truth before they can lead anywhere useful.

Re-defining defence project success

There’s a widely held view in Australia that defence projects are almost invariably doomed to failure: they’ll run late, they’ll cost more than expected and the equipment won’t work -  or at least not as well as it should.

I don’t happen to agree, and the Defence Materiel Organisation (DMO) has figures that challenge this view also. But I’m concerned that the expectations raised (or, more accurately, lowered) by this view will have a malign shaping effect on a number of future defence projects, not the least of them being the Future Submarine – Project Sea 1000.

I contend that an important reason why defence industry, the DMO and defence acquisition in general are held in low regard by many in Defence, Parliament and the general public, is the failure to understand properly why a handful of high-profile projects went badly wrong. Added to this has been an unrealistic appraisal of other complex developmental projects which have delivered remarkable capability despite being branded at various point as failures or, just as damningly, ‘troubled’. In my opinion that unrealistic appraisal has its roots, in turn, in a contracting philosophy that demonstrates a complete mis-understanding of developmental high-technology projects.

Two of the best known examples of unsuccessful projects are the original combat system for the Collins-class submarine and the SH-2G(A) Super Seasprite project. Both were abject failures and have become a lens through which many in Defence and Government and most of the general public view defence acquisition. The trouble is, they are a distorting lens and Defence has not been able (some would say it hasn’t even tried as yet) to resolve the picture.

There are plenty of projects that went well: the acquisition of the Super Hornet, C-17 and M1 Abrams main battle tank, for example. However, they were all acquired off the shelf, with the minimum of change from the relevant US specification. By international defence standards they were no more challenging, really, than buying a new car.

What about developmental projects? Anzac-class frigate, anybody? An unsung success story – and especially in the case of Saab Australia’s 9LV Mk3 combat management system, which worked perfectly from the outset. And, yes, this was a developmental system despite being based on an architecture developed originally by the Swedish parent company. That combat management system has been evolved and developed incrementally to the point where, as an unambiguously Australian product, it now controls one of the most sophisticated tactical maritime air and missile defence systems in the world.

What about the Wedgetail Airborne Early Warning & Control (AEW&C) system? Or the Bushmaster Protected Mobility Vehicle (PMV)? Or the Jindalee Operational Radar Network? These have delivered outstanding operational capabilities, in spite of severe difficulties during their development stages.

One of the things these ultimately successful projects have in common with the unsuccessful ones, in my view, is the contracting philosophy. All were highly risky, complex developmental projects acquired under a single fixed-price contract. In each case, from what I as an outsider could gather, the customer focussed on the contract and not on the project outcome, to the detriment of the project and, ultimately, to his own reputation. You might say that simply concentrating on delivery of the contract will result in delivery of the required operational outcome, but I would argue this is not so, especially in a technologically risky developmental project.

The Collins-class combat system was acquired under a very prescriptive fixed price contract that tried to anticipate what was technically possible. It became clear as the project progressed that the combat system specified in the contract could not be built, and certainly couldn’t deliver the functionality required. Did Defence change the contract? No. Even when the project was at its nadir, and a new direction should have been sought urgently, the then-head of Defence acquisition told a Senate committee (and I paraphrase somewhat): “The Commonwealth is protected by a fixed-price contract and we are holding the contractor’s feet to the fire to ensure he gives us what he promised.”

The Commonwealth was not protected by this fixed-price contract: it was imprisoned, and it swallowed the key so that it couldn’t escape. Eventually, sanity was imposed and a replacement combat system was ordered, but not everybody learned the lesson.

The Wedgetail AEW&C system, likewise, was acquired under a single, fixed-price contract signed in 2000, with first delivery of an all-new, developmental system scheduled for 2006. It was not until 2010, when the project was running four years late and the Wedgetail’s MESA radar was still failing to deliver the performance specified in the contract, that the Commonwealth took the radar trials data to the Lincoln Laboratory at MIT and asked if the performance specified in the contract (and promised by the contractor, it must be said) was even possible. Had the Wedgetail project been trying inadvertently to step outside the boundaries of the laws of physics?

Quite apart from the fact this question should have been asked before the contract was even signed, it was clear at this point that in spite of its shortcomings the Wedgetail system had magnificent potential and was in fact delivering performance well beyond anything else that was available on the market, then or now. And yet Wedgetail was pilloried. Because it wasn’t delivering 100% of what the contract specified (never mind that nobody even knew if that was physically possible), it was treated within Canberra as a near-disaster.

A fundamental problem with all of the projects named above is the same: firstly, a fixed-price contract for a risky, complex developmental project; and, secondly, a contracting and project management philosophy that seems to ignore the reality of technical and schedule risk and focuses instead purely on delivery of the contract.

Why is this a problem? Because in a developmental project you cannot predict exactly what the technology will deliver, nor when, nor exactly what it will cost. Not only will the customer receive the capability later than he anticipated, he probably won't receive exactly what he asked for in the first place, and he's likely to be paying more than he expected. Unless he could anticipate this, and make allowances for it in his original justification for embarking on the project, the customer is going to be disappointed and probably quite angry.

His relationship with the contractor will almost certainly be damaged – possibly beyond repair. And his reputation will suffer also: not only will the customer be blamed (fairly or unfairly) for the project’s difficulties, the equipment in question will start life with an undeserved reputation which will dog its early career (think F-111 and Collins-class submarine) and which it may never be able to shake off (think Collins-class submarine).

It’s impossible for the parties to sign a fixed-price developmental contract with any confidence at all. An inflexible contract which specifies in advance the deliverables, schedule and cost of a developmental project isn’t worth the paper it is written on. Any customer who insists on such a contract simply doesn’t understand his own business, and he will be punished for it.

The trouble is, when there is only one customer, and only one source of income for the defence industry as a whole, the companies competing for this work will accept (sometimes against their better judgement) the terms and conditions and contractual regime imposed by the customer simply in order to win the work.

The messy reality of developmental technology is that you can’t predict exactly what technical performance you will receive, nor when, and the contract regime must be flexible enough to accommodate that uncertainty. And it must also be flexible enough to allow a bit of a trade-off in ultimate performance in some areas if the financial or schedule cost of achieving that is too great, as well as sacrificing ‘desirable’ features to ensure there’s sufficient money to pay for ‘essential’ features, if these prove harder to achieve.

Of course, it helps if both the customer and the supplier have a realistic understanding of what technology costs and what’s actually achievable at a given price: setting realistic expectations is the first step towards defining success. That’s the product of technological mastery: the understanding of what technology can achieve, how it is developing and evolving, and what the risks, costs and likely benefits of pursuing a particular development path might be. A customer who doesn’t understand what he’s asking for, and how much he ought to be paying for it, is almost certain to be disappointed.

There’s another issue also: a fixed-price contract seems to go with an ‘all or nothing’ mentality on the customer’s part: the way this plays out in Australian defence acquisition is if you don’t get 100% of what you’ve contracted for, then essentially you have nothing. This is wrong. Worse - it is stupid.

Developmental projects need to be contracted in successive phases so that risks can be identified and then mitigated progressively, and so that expectations of cost, capability and schedule can be calibrated accurately, and recalibrated if necessary, for each step. This approach manages risk and cost and allows the development trajectory to be adjusted to reflect emerging reality; it also allows capability to be introduced incrementally, rather than in a single ‘big bang’. Users get their hands on equipment and start learning how to use it (and maybe even take it to war) while development is still under way, with enhancements following in successive phases. Think Spitfire and Hurricane in World War 2 – during their first 18 months in service both aircraft grew significantly in operational capability, and both were subject to constant upgrades thereafter.

Under the flawed contracting philosophy I’ve described, imposing a ‘big bang’ approach based on a single, fixed-price contract and then delaying delivery and service entry until the (possibly quite arbitrary and unrealistic) terms of the contract are finally satisfied often means that the operator is denied useable capability and an early opportunity to train and develop procedures and doctrine. Furthermore, the development process in turn is denied the benefits of user feedback. And, of course, the project is considered a failure, or at risk of failure – in today’s terms that means it is placed on the Projects of Concern list, the DMO and contractor are pilloried for under-performance and the reputations of all concerned, and the confidence of the Government and general public in the wider defence enterprise, are damaged.

It is this track record of perceived failure that has undermined the confidence of the public, many in defence and the wider defence ‘commentariat’ in Australia’s ability to develop and deliver complex, risky and technologically challenging projects.

Luckily, there have been recent projects that inspire confidence. The Anzac frigate Anti-Ship Missile Defence (ASMD) upgrade stands out as a text-book example of how a complex, high-risk, high-technology project can be developed and delivered successfully. The project ran through several phases, each one developing the capability and retiring the risk incrementally and setting achievable performance, schedule and financial goals for the next - and calibrating expectations accurately for these things also, and in some cases canvasing the possibility of cancellation if certain goals weren't, or couldn't, be met. The ground-breaking CEAFAR and CEAMOUNT radars were developed and built by an Australian company, CEA Technologies; the ship and its combat management system was modified extensively by BAE Systems Australia and Saab Systems Australia to accommodate the new sensor suite (and other enhancements and additions, of course). The project as a whole was managed by Defence, and it really is a credit to all of these organisations.

Of course, there is a difference between the Anzac upgrade and the development of an all-new submarine. The point is that a flexible and realistic approach has been shown to manage risks and expectations and protect Defence and Industry from the uninformed comment and premature judgements that hang over such projects like a Sword of Damocles. It has shown that success can and should be defined in terms of a capability outcome, not the possibly arbitrary terms of an inflexible contract, and can be achieved and celebrated.

The challenge for Defence and the Government is to recreate these conditions on the submarine project: to create the conditions for success, not to create a ‘defensive’ contracting regime that focuses solely on the process and automatically provides multiple reasons for them, or others, to make a false declaration of failure.

The Future Submarine project will undoubtedly encounter technical challenges and disappointments. These are an indivisible part of ambitious developmental projects and Australian industry is not immune to them. Australia’s defence industry has demonstrated before that it can cope with highly demanding, complex technology development problems – the resilience and flexibility that get a project through the inevitable difficulties is partly a function of the technical expertise, ingenuity and management skills of the industry players and partly a function of the quality and flexibility of the acquisition process and the people administering it. In particular, the contracting process needs to be based on a realistic understanding of operational capability and of the enduring challenges of developmental projects: technology, technical and financial risks. This will demand a high level of technical, professional and commercial mastery on the part of the customer.

If the customer rises to this challenge and creates the conditions for success, and is prepared to defend the process in the face of uninformed or malign comment and criticism, then building the Future Submarine in Australia is a realistic and achievable proposition.

Agile fighters - just a thought

I recently watched some video footage of the Su-35 at this year's Paris Air Show; at the start of the year  I also had the distinct pleasure of watching an F-22 Raptor perform its flying display at the Australian International Air Show at Avalon.

In both cases the pilots showed off the low-speed handling characteristics of their aircraft brilliantly, but their displays, much as I enjoyed them, left me with a nagging thought. If you're close enough to your enemy that your platform superiority gives you some sort of advantage in a dog flight (which tends to degenerate into a low-speed combat), than you're too close: you're within range of an infra red guided missile such as a Sidewinder or Asraam which have a high off-boresight cueing capability and are extremely difficult to out-run.

If you're going slowly enough to perform a backwards somersault, or rear back through 90 degrees-plus in a high-alpha 'Cobra' manoeuvre to get your nose on the target, you're a sitting target for a gun or missile shot.

But why would you take the risk anyway? Why not take a shot from long range with an infra red or radar-guided missile? Oh, I forgot - if you're up against a stealthy F-22 or F-35, it may not work. You HAVE to get in close, if you can. Tricky.

When will people get it into their heads that air battles are not simply a sequence of single combats fought at visual range between pilots who are trying to get into each others' "Six O'Clock"?

75 years on - lessons (and some comfort?) for the Joint Strike Fighter from the Spitfire program

A new fighter aircraft is designed. It embodies a new engine, new construction techniques and new armament. The prototype shows great promise and an order is placed for a significant number of aircraft before production gets under way. But development is slow, and mass production of the aircraft encounters one frustrating delay after another. Its critics grow in number and there is talk of cancellation of the project.

Am I talking about the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter? No, I’m talking about that most iconic of combat aircraft the Vickers Supermarine Spitfire, the first production example of which made its maiden flight 75 years ago, on 14 May 1938, in the hands of test pilot Jeffrey Quill.

 That flight took place over two years after the prototype made its maiden flight in the hands of Vickers’ chief test pilot Mutt Summers, on 6 March 1936. A production order for 320 Spitfires was placed with Supermarine just a week after a service test pilot, Flight Lieutenant Humphrey Edwardes-Jones, flew the prototype for the first time on 26 May 1936.

While two years might not seem a long time today, in those days it was an unconscionable delay – and quite avoidable. The result of the mounting delays to the Spitfire program was very nearly the cancellation of the project; right up to early 1940, just months before the Battle of Britain, the Spitfire was seen within the British Air Ministry as an ‘interim’ solution pending development of a more suitable fighter to take on the German Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitt Bf109.

Indeed, so disenchanted with the Spitfire was British officialdom, and so concerned at British industry’s lack of capacity to build fighters in the numbers required, that in March 1940 the British government placed an order with North American Aviation to design and build 320 single-seat fighters of a new design, to be armed with four .303in machine guns and powered by the Allison V-1710 engine. The first of these flew in October 1940 and deliveries began in January 1941, by which time this new aeroplane had been christened the Mustang. But that’s another story.

In 1939 the official view, conditioned by extreme disappointment over the difficulties of putting the aircraft into production, was that production of the Spitfire would eventually be phased out and Supermarine’s factories turned over to production of the twin-engined Westland Whirlwind or Bristol Beaufighter. But when the energetic Lord Beaverbrook was appointed Minister for Aircraft Production in May 1940 he immediately saw that the coming air battle would be fought, and must be won, by the RAF’s Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes so he made production of these aircraft an absolute priority. 

What was the problem with the Spitfire? There were four, and they all compounded each other.

The first was that although Supermarine was best-known for building the series of Rolls-Royce powered high-speed floatplanes, the S4 through to the S6B, which resulted in Great Britain winning permanent ownership of the prestigious Schneider Trophy, this wasn’t its stock in trade. What it did most was build relatively small quantities of amphibious bi-planes. Supermarine was, in modern terms, little more than a ‘smart’ cottage industry, turning out barely a couple of dozen hand-built aluminium, wood and fabric float planes each year from a factory at Woolston, on the River Itchen, near Southampton.

Notwithstanding the pure genius of its chief designer, RJ Mitchell (and his under-sung aerodynamicist, the Canadian Beverley Shenstone), Supermarine was simply not capable of building a high-speed all-metal fighter in the quantities demanded by the RAF. Its inherent lack of capacity was compounded by the shambolic nature of the Supermarine project office. For all Mitchell’s talent, he and the company’s management were unable to get a grip on the practicalities of producing aircraft in large numbers. Indeed, Supermarine’s parent company, Vickers, sent no less a figure than Dr Barnes Wallis (of Wellington bomber and ‘Dambuster’ bouncing bomb fame) to Supermarine’s plant in order to lick it into shape. Mitchell objected violently and Wallis was posted back to Vickers’ Weybridge factory; Supermarine continued on its traditional path, straight towards disaster.

The second major problem facing the Spitfire program was that, like its exact contemporary the Bf109, the Spitfire was a radical departure in the design and construction of high speed fighters. For a start, it was all-metal. This was the only way to achieve Mitchell’s design aim of a thin, strong wing and slim fuselage capable of sustaining very high speeds. Secondly, it was designed for speed, not ease of production: there was barely a straight line on the aircraft; rather, like a woman’s body, a series of elegant curves blended gracefully into one another to produce a single glorious whole. Seen from any angle it was arresting and beautiful. And it was an absolute pig to manufacture.

Initially, Supermarine planned to build most of the fuselage at Woolston and carry out final assembly at its nearby Eastleigh aerodrome. Manufacture of the wings and other components such as the entire tail section would be outsourced to local manufacturers.

The problems with this scheme were that, first, none of the sub-contractors had much experience of manufacturing complex metal shapes in such numbers; and secondly, Supermarine’s drawings left something to be desired – there simply wasn’t the detailed information in them required to produce these items accurately, and Supermarine didn’t provide much help. This problem found an uncomfortable echo when Australian shipyards began fabricating hull modules for the Royal Australian Navy’s new class of Air Warfare Destroyers and found that the drawings supplied from ship designer Navantia, via the Australian project office, didn’t contain sufficient information for the Australian yard concerned to build the first block module properly.

This leads to the third major problem with the Spitfire program. In order to build them at the necessary production rate plans were made for Spitfires to be built at a so-called ‘Shadow Factory’ in Castle Bromwich, near Birmingham. The factory was built (slowly and by a surly, poorly managed and strike-prone workforce) and was to be managed by no less than Lord Nuffield, the founder of the Morris car company who was considered to be an expert in mass production. In fact, by the late 1930s Nuffield was well past his prime and his organisation had absolutely no idea about manufacturing aircraft. 

Indeed, according to Leo McKinstry in his outstanding book “Spitfire – Portrait of a Legend”, one motor industry veteran at Castle Bromwich was horrified at the suggestion the Spitfire should be made of aluminium. “Make things with aluminium?” he exclaimed. “Not bloody likely! That stuff is OK for pots and pans but we are going to make things to beat the Nazis. We’ll use iron.” Another Castle Bromwich manager insisted the Spitfire’s wing should be redesigned so that it was easier to manufacture: “The air would not know the difference between straight and curved leading edges.”

In both cases the Air Ministry had to insist the aircraft was built according to the drawings. In the end, Beaverbrook wrested control of Castle Bromwich from Nuffield, put a team of Vickers managers into the place and progress began to be made. But the planned production rate of 100 aircraft a month wasn’t achieved until well into the summer of 1940. Had the Spitfire gone into full production on anything like the original schedule it’s likely RAF Fighter Command’s frontline squadrons would all have been equipped with this aircraft and the toll wrought on the Luftwaffe during the summer of 1940 would have been even higher. But that’s all by the way.

The fourth major problem with the Spitfire program wasn’t strictly a Spitfire problem at all. It was a whole of industry problem that exists today in Australia, the UK and, increasingly now in the USA. It was, quite simply, that the British aviation industry didn’t now how to build large numbers of aircraft. The Air Ministry and RAF kept a number of aircraft companies alive during the 1920s and ‘30s by awarding small contracts to design and build experimental aircraft, or relatively small numbers of new aircraft. There was some progress in the design and construction of aircraft and aero-engines, some of it driven by challenges such as the Schneider Trophy races which stimulated innovation by designers across Europe and North America. But until the menace of Nazism took shape and cast its shadow across Europe there was no great official appetite for ground-breaking innovation and massive numbers.

Jeffrey Quill sets out the problem quite elegantly in his book “Spitfire – A Test Pilot’s Story”.

“The awkward truth was that in 1936 no firm in the industry was in a position to respond effectively to a sudden demand for great expansion of its production capacity and simultaneously make great strides in the technological field… With hindsight, the initial shortcomings of the [Spitfire] subcontracting scheme can only be attributed to the same basic cause – namely that for years the industry had been starved of orders and could barely keep its factories in business on the orders it did receive. So where were the experienced and capable sub-contractors to be found on the fringe of a half-starved industry? They simply did not exist.”

There’s a lesson here for any government that professes a need for a proficient, and efficient, aerospace or defence industry.

The long and short of it is that the Spitfire was a great design, so far ahead of its time that the British aircraft industry had to learn (slowly and painfully) a whole new set of techniques for manufacturing it in the quantities required. And once its initial manufacturing problems were overcome the Spitfire became the pre-eminent fighter of its generation. Its only real peers were the Focke-Wulf 190, Messerschmitt Bf109 and the Rolls-Royce Merlin-powered variants of the North American P-51 Mustang. The Hawker Hurricane, to which the RAF and the free world owes a massive debt, was a stopgap in technical terms and never close to the Spitfire and Bf109 in performance terms, but it was exactly right for its time and made history in its day.

So what does all this have to do with the F-35 Lightning II?

Only this: the Spitfire, like the F-111, was a fundamentally good design that pushed the boundaries of technical knowledge and manufacturing practice. It’s arguable that these aircraft should have been designed (or re-designed) so they were easier to manufacture. One could make the same argument for the F-35 family. That’s to miss the point, in all cases: these aircraft were designed they way they were because they had a very specific job to do. Changing the design to make the aircraft easier to build would in each case have compromised its combat effectiveness. Every aircraft design represent some sort of compromise in any case, but in the case of the Spitfire, whose design is now well documented, RJ Mitchell refused to compromise on aero-propulsive performance – and quite rightly. The F-111 was designed for sustained high speed flight at low altitude in all weathers, day and night. If it couldn’t do that then there was no point to the aircraft – despite its technical challenges in the early days nobody sought to compromise its performance as a way of making the challenges easier to surmount.

The F-35 is designed to be stealthy, to be a respectable (though not necessarily a stellar) performer and to endow its pilot with massive situational awareness. Leaving aside the difficulties of integrating an avionics and sensor suite of unprecedented capability and complexity, mass producing a stealthy aircraft involves manufacturing technology challenges which no aircraft company has ever had to master before. There can be no doubt these challenges will be mastered, in time. Meanwhile, the battle the F-35’s advocates need to win is for the hearts and minds of the customers, and this become harder to win the longer the battle goes on. The examples of both the Spitfire and the F-111 show that persistence brings rewards.

There is one significant difference between the Spitfire and the F-35. The Spitfire’s manufacturer had no idea, in the early days, how to build a modern all-metal fighter in large numbers; and it lacked sub-contractors who understood new technologies and the techniques associated with new materials. The same is not true of the F-35. The consortium building it – Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems, led by prime contractor Lockheed Martin, with Pratt & Whitney developing the F135 engine – has an industrial pedigree that embraces collaborative, multi-national projects dancing on the leading edge of aerospace technology. The international supply chain, fed from eight different countries, isn’t carrying any freeloaders in a technical sense. But the technical challenges remain: a new construction process; a new engine and, for the F-35B variant, a new propulsion system; and a new weapon system based on a suite of avionics and sensors that’s never been integrated on such a scale before, and certainly not in a single-seat aircraft.

It’s wrong to suggest that the F-35 is the Spitfire of the 21st century, but the history of the Spitfire program should give heart to the team developing the F-35.

Technology.... Yech!

Sometimes technology can seem like a very, very bad thing. OK, I'm grumpy today, but there's a reason for this.

I'm a journalist, I occasionally need to record interviews with important people and this often happens over the phone. Once upon a time telephone handsets would allow you to attach a mike which would pick up the sound so you could record to a cassette player or note taker. Not any more - nothing you can buy has a mike-friendly handset. This wasn't a problem while I was using an old phone/fax with a built-in micro-cassette recorder as its answering system. But that died after a long, purposeful life and the new machine has a handset that isn't microphone friendly.

So I decided to get the Skype add-on that records conversations - easy! And it works, except that you need to call the interviewee on the Skype phone so that you can activate the recorder. People can't call you, which is a minor inconvenience, sometimes. Skype records the conversation as a sound file which you can play back on all sorts of machines - very useful.

Today I was supposed to interview a cabinet minister, so I checked the Skype set up a good three quarters of an hour before hand, including the Skype headphone. This all worked fine. I rang the minister at the appointed time, and the d**n thing refused to b****y well work!

After several attempts and a great deal of very bad language I called him on my normal land line, put him on speaker phone and recorded the interview that way with my little digital recorder. It worked, and I was able to save the interview as an MP.3 file which i could then send to my transcriber (an angel of a woman named Miki - details available on request to bona fide transcription clients)...

I've lost some more hair this afternoon...