It sounded like a major win for the local economy when news broke that Lockheed Martin Corp. planned to move future production of its F-16 fighter jet to Greenville County.
The Bethesda, Md.-based defense contractor has refurbished military aircraft at a former Air Force base in southern Greenville County for more than three decades.
But it has always used its 16-hangar complex at what is now called the South Carolina Technology and Aviation Center to modify aircraft made elsewhere — such as the P3 Orion or C-130 — and never for the original manufacture of an aircraft.
That would change if F-16 production moves from Texas to Greenville.
If that happens, Lockheed would need to add 160-180 jobs to its current local workforce of about 500, according to Don Erickson, the company’s top local executive. He said F-16 fabrication and assembly could begin locally in late 2018 in an existing hangar modified for the work.
Problem is, at this point, it’s not certain if the F-16 even has a future.
Out of Orders
The U.S. government is no longer buying the 40-year-old fighter — known as the “Fighting Falcon” — and sales are a shadow of what they were in the 1980s and 1990s.
Deliveries peaked at 304 in 1988 and had dropped to 16 by 2015, according to the Teal Group, an aerospace consultancy in Fairfax, Va.
“The F-16 is a legendary program. It’s just that it’s on its last legs,” said Richard Aboulafia, a Teal Group analyst. “They’re just about out of orders. Conceivably, they could build a few more.”
Lockheed is scheduled to complete what at this point is the final F-16 order — 18 jets for Iraq — this fall at the Fort Worth, Texas, factory where it has made the fighter since the late 1970s, according to company spokesman John Losinger.
After that, Lockheed expects to make F-16s for Bahrain, Losinger said, though he acknowledged that deal has not yet been cleared by the U.S. government, a requirement for the sale of any advanced military equipment to a foreign country.
Losinger said the approval process involves the State Department and Congress and that he couldn’t provide a date when the Bahrain deal would be cleared to move forward.
The Bahrain deal involves up to 19 aircraft, Erickson said.
According to Aboulafia, it may never move forward, though he considers it more likely under the Trump administration than the Obama administration, which had taken the position that Bahrain’s human rights record needed to improve first.
In other potential F-16 business, the United States and India are negotiating a deal that Aboulafia said could ultimately involve more than 100 of the aircraft. But as part of that deal, India is sure to insist that production of the jet be moved within its own borders, he said.
Aboulafia said India made that demand successfully with previous purchases of military aircraft from France and Russia. “The Indians are not going to buy that number of planes if they don’t get their own line,” he said. “They’re just not.”
Lockheed’s Greenville complex might make the initial planes sold to India, he said, and keep some of the work over the life of that potential contract.
A ‘Significant Market’
Losinger insisted a “significant market” remains for the F-16 among countries that aren’t authorized to buy Lockheed’s newer fighter, the F-35, or don’t need or can’t afford it, especially in the Middle East or Asia/Pacific.
But Aboulafia said that’s “been the case for some years now and they just haven’t gotten any orders. The market seems to be moving elsewhere.”
Aboulafia was more positive about another scenario in which Lockheed could begin manufacturing an aircraft in Greenville – the company’s bid to supply 350 jets to the U.S. Air Force for training fighter pilots.
In hopes of landing that multibillion-dollar contract, Lockheed has proposed supplying the Air Force with a variant of an existing jet, the T50A.
Lockheed has said it would import the T50A in pieces from South Korea, where it’s made by Korea Aerospace Industries, and assemble the pieces in the Greenville County complex, adding 200 jobs.
It’s competing for the work with a Boeing/Saab alliance that has proposed building an entirely new jet from scratch.
Aboulafia said he gives Lockheed a 60 percent chance of winning the contest because its plan doesn’t involve a lot of upfront product development costs that add to the price.
Boeing/Saab, by contrast, “has to find a way to make a billion or 2 billion go away, and that usually means increasing the offer price,” he said.
Welcome News
Questions about the F-16’s future notwithstanding, South Carolina officials welcomed the news that Lockheed may move production of the jet to Greenville.
Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a retired Air Force Reserve colonel and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that the decision is “yet another feather in [Greenville’s] cap and will pay dividends for the city, community, and state in years to come.”
Deborah Cameron, director of aerospace initiatives with S.C. Aerospace, a public/private initiative that seeks to develop the industry in South Carolina, said hosting F-16 production should expand the state’s “talent pool” and burnish its reputation as an aerospace center.
“I think it also demonstrates that Lockheed has a lot of confidence in Greenville and South Carolina,” she said. “They’re obviously very impressed with the things they’re seeing here.”
Carl Washburn, head of the Aircraft Maintenance Technology department at Greenville Tech, said he expects the department’s longtime relationship with Lockheed to grow.
The department, certified by the Federal Aviation Administration to train aircraft technicians, has been providing labor to Lockheed since the 1980s and is located near the company’s local complex.
If production of the T50A and F-16 both move to Greenville, Washburn said, Lockheed is “going to need a bunch of technicians, which is going to help our program.”
Washburn said he and Walt Carter, avionics program coordinator for the department, both worked on the F-16 when they were in the Air Force.
“We understand how all the systems are integrated together,” Washburn said. “It just makes it easier for us to train people to be ready to work on them.”
