National Defence Committee on Dec. 13th, 2011

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

On this point about unpredictability and not knowing what the future holds, most people either figure out what their tolerance for risk is or they try to hedge that risk somehow. You've certainly described the defence of Canadian territories as a no-fail mission, as have previous chiefs who have been before us.

I want to come back to the following question. What do you do in this context where the F-35 development program and the whole issue of the cost of the F–35s has been complicated by the highly politicized and intractable budgetary process in the United States, which is threatening to derail the program—or at least parts of it—or to lower the numbers, etc? So in terms of your point about flexibility, agility, and dealing with risk, is it fair to say that, should this three- to five-year delay materialize, you choice would either be to further rehab the CF–18s or, if time allows, move your block purchase of the F–35s further up in the production line?

[LGen André Deschamps]

If I understood your question on the issue of delays, I wouldn't agree with your portrayal of three to five years. I don't think that's going to be the case. Right now, one year is the current readjustment.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

If I could interrupt, general, this is my concern. As chief of the air staff, you are far more informed than I am of all the news about this F–35 program. Are you not taking into account the plethora of assessments suggesting this could be delayed by a significant period of time, and maybe not even materialize? Is that something you take into account, or do you just hope that 2016…?

This seems to me to have everything to do with readiness. How does the air force deal with a program where all the suggestions are that there will be a very significant delay in the timelines in which we're going to receive these planes?

[LGen André Deschamps]

Thank you for that question.

The issue is do I pay attention, and the answer is yes.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

No, that's not it, sir. The question is how do you deal with that? How do you plan for that?

[LGen André Deschamps]

The issue right now is confidence, whether we have confidence that the F-35 program will deliver. That's pretty fundamental. The U.S. Air Force has a giant investment in that program. It is central to their future and they remain absolutely confident that it will deliver the goods. The U.S. process will take its course. With respect to the program's capacity to deliver on their expectations, they are fully confident. We've had discussions. Everybody's looking at the same things. Every nation in this program is also watching this closely. This is pretty fundamental to our capabilities in the future. If there's a problem, we need to be aware of it and we need to find solutions.

We remain confident that we will be able to transition our fleets within a viable timeframe for our current fleet. Is there a re-investment opportunity for the F-18? I think we've pretty much done what we can with that airplane. At some point after 2020, we will start facing some structural issues that will be difficult to reconcile and we will have to make some decisions. Based on what we see right now, we are confident that we can make this transition in a timeframe that gives us the flexibility to bring the F-35 into operation while putting the F-18s into retirement as we get into the 2020s.

[Matthew Kellway, NDP, Beaches—East York, ON]

So there's no contingency plan, I hear you saying.

Let me get to the numbers. Originally, the air force had recommended 80 F-35s. My colleague, Mr. McKay, suggested that when General Natynczyk was here, he had been absolutely firm that 65 was a minimum. You have recently been in the media saying that if we don't have 65, we will have to review our ability to provide concurrent activity.

Could you give me some insight into those considerations? What are the trade-offs? How does one do a review of this situation?

[LGen André Deschamps]

When we started the program, and again in 2003 or so, when they were asking what the rough numbers would be if Canada were interested, they went with what was in our fleet establishment at the time, which was 80 F-18s. That was a benchmark to start the planning.

Once we got into the analysis phase and started looking at how the airplane operates, how it's sustained, how it generates sorties, we quickly found out that we could do the same mission sets with fewer platforms. That's where the number 65 came from, through that analysis, and that's what government supported in the CFDS and the procurement process. That's where we are. In the end, government will make the decision they need to make and we will employ the platforms we are given to maximum efficiency.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Sorry, your time has expired.

Mr. Easter, you have the floor.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

This is not my regular committee, but one thing I did want to say, General, having participated in the air force side of the parliamentary program, is how good that program is. It's out of Trenton and elsewhere. I did the program, and I think it's something that needs to be continued for parliamentarians. I assume a lot of people on the defence committee would have participated. I was involved somewhat with search and rescue, which is important on the east coast. There's nothing like that having that participation to give people a reasonable idea of some of the things you folks face.

Search and rescue is a critical area in Atlantic Canada, where I come from. There is some concern about the current status of the Cormorant helicopter. What is the situation with search and rescue in the future? Will the Cormorant helicopter be the mainstay? Could you look out into the future and tell us what to expect or what is needed in that area.

[LGen André Deschamps]

Good question.

I'll just go back to your first point on the state of our current fleets. The Cormorants are improving. Last year, there was an initiative by government to procure a fairly substantial amount of spares from the U.S., as they had shut down one of their fleets, the EH-101-based platform, which had great commonality with the Cormorants. So we accrued a fair amount of spares. We're starting to see the effect of those new spares in the system. As they get introduced, it has helped bring up the availability of aircraft. It hasn't come up dramatically yet. Last year when we talked, I believe we had about 7 of 14 platforms available for missions. Right now we're at 18. If I look at today's, we expect that level to come up much higher as those spares are felt through the system. I'm reasonably optimistic that we will see the Cormorant's availability start coming up beyond what it's been for the last couple of years, given some of the technical issues we've had with the platform. It's a very good platform. It's world-leading. We've had some technical issues to be resolved and some maintenance challenges, and we're working hard on those with our partners to bring that fleet up to where it should be from a performance perspective. When it's out doing the job, it's doing fantastic work for us.

As for the rest of our fleet, the fixed-wing fleet, as we replace our old legacy Hercs with the Js, we're husbanding the remaining legacy Hercs and putting the newer ones into the SAR business. So we're seeing certainly an improvement, because we're putting the younger airframes in that role right now. So I expect to see that maintenance bill start to be reduced a bit as we retire the really old ones. Our Buffalo fleets are doing okay. Clearly we're still looking at the sparing and maintenance aspects of the Buffalo to keep it viable until such time as we get to a replacement fleet through fixed-wing search and rescue. But they're maintaining their capabilities, and they're both doing missions. Out of six airplanes, typically three to four are available on any given day for mission sets. So we're doing okay. We're hanging in there.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

The equipment is one side of search and rescue, but on the recruitment and staffing side, one thing that people in the fishing community have mentioned to me is that there sometimes are concerns about recruitment and the desire of people who have entered the armed forces to be involved in search and rescue.

[LGen André Deschamps]

Thank you for that question.

I mentioned earlier that our SAR trade is healthy. As far as the numbers are concerned, there's no lack of applicants, and we're actually producing them in sufficient numbers right now to populate our squadrons robustly. I'm very satisfied with that.

We had some challenges last year with our flight engineers onboard the Cormorants, by and large due to that flying limitation we have on Cormorants, or the number of hours we can fly. That caused us to have some challenges in training enough flight engineers, given that we had some attrition of people leaving to go to commercial businesses that fly helicopters. So we've had a bit of a draw, but we've managed to stabilize that. We're okay now. We've revised some of our training so we can generate those FEEs on time so that we can populate the squadron.

The health of the squadrons is coming back up. We had some challenges last year, but I think we're seeing that trend come back up to where they will be at their manning levels, which will take the pressure off some of our folks who have been working pretty hard for the last couple of years.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

I have one further question.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

The time has expired, unfortunately. You're well over time now.

[Wayne Easter, Liberal, Malpeque, PE]

Okay, good. Thanks.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Mr. Hawn, you get the last question.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

General, I'd like to take us back to a little over 30 years ago when we were acquiring the F-18. Is it fair to say that it was a development program at the time, that there were in fact far fewer F-18s flying when we made the decision to buy that airplane than there were F-35s when we made the decision to buy it?

[LGen André Deschamps]

Thank you for that question.

I was just a little whippersnapper back then, Mr. Hawn. I remember being part of the legacy fleet, looking at the F-18 with a mixture of jealousy, I guess, and a bit of envy. Of course, the F-18, like any new capability, had its share of introductory problems. We had fatigue cracks that came out and that had to be dealt with. The fact is that the partnership between Canadian industry and the company and the U.S. navy solved that.

The point is that any new technology will have its challenges. The fact is that if it's the right product, in the end you'll get the service you need from it. I think this is where we're confident that the F-35 will be much like the F-18's introduction. It will have some initial teething problems, but I have no doubt that this platform will deliver on its base expectations.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

The purpose of the test program the F-35 is going through now is specifically to find faults, so that they can be corrected before it goes into production. Here I'd mention things like communications. You may not recall this, but the F-18 had some communications challenges, specifically in the north. The F-18 had cold weather challenges. The F-18 had fatigue cracking.

Is it fair to say that the purpose of test programs is precisely to find those things? They shouldn't be taken to mean that the airplane will never do something because it failed it in the test program, but the purpose of the test program is to find those things so they can be fixed and the airplane, like the F-18, will perform brilliantly for decades.

[LGen André Deschamps]

Exactly. That's what test programs are supposed to do, to pressurize the system to the maximum to see where the failure points could be. They beat those things to a pulp to find out where the failure points will be 8,000 hours from now. So that's the whole point.

The F-35 is a little different because they are doing low-rate production as they're doing the very demanding testing. Therefore, as they learn from the testing, they quickly readjust the production to answer any of the concerns identified in the testing. It's a novel approach that maybe wasn't done when we did some of the earlier generation aircraft, but clearly they are very agile and are solving those problems as they move along.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Any new program, especially a high-tech program, which the F-18 was, and the F-35 certainly is, entails risk management. That's a huge part of the program.

Would you say that we're better off being part of a nine-nation consortium, if you will, to manage and mitigate that risk than we were as a single nation flying the airplane? Along with that, I don't think it's fair to say there are no contingencies. The military always has contingencies developed in-house for whatever; they're just not necessarily bandied about, because then they become gospel and that becomes unproductive. But is it fair to say that risk management and contingency planning are always a part of a program like this?

[LGen André Deschamps]

Again, the military, being in the nature of who we are, will always have notions for how to deal with situations that unfold. We always retain our own view of agility, how we can maintain our readiness. Ultimately, we're going to keep focused on how to maintain sufficient readiness throughout this transition period to allow the CF—and certainly the RCAF—to be able to deliver on what the government needs from it over the next decade.

Again, the F-35 program, as you pointed out, is going through a phase of development and low-rate production and will have its challenges. The fact that they're catching them early is great, which gives us confidence that we won't have to sort these out once the airplanes are on the line, as we did with the F-18s. So I'm very confident that we will resolve these issues.

The issue is looking for that time when we put in our order for the airplanes. So the right time for Canada is what we're focused on right now with our partners.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

I have a little more focused question on pilot training, and specifically the F-35.

Where are we right now with planning for where we're going to train the pilots? Is there a potential for Cold Lake, for example, to be a site for more international F-35 training? Just where do we sit on that right now?