The F-35 jet has been the whipping boy for auditors and politicians all week, but it remains the darling of Canada’s aerospace industry.

Industry veterans are shrugging off the vitriol of “scandal” and “fiasco” by remaining focused on the $12 billion they say the troubled program can bring to Canada.

“It’s a state of the art platform,” says Maryse Harvey, an official at Aerospace Industries Association of Canada (AIAC). “Hence the delays and the challenges that they’re encountering — it’s pure innovation.”

While the government decides what do to and who to blame for its deeply flawed military procurement process, it’s business as usual for Canadian aerospace firms who see the political brouhaha as an uncomfortable but routine stage in the production of a new aircraft.

Arguably no program in recent history has promised so many lucrative contracts as has the F-35 Lightning II.

Today, more than 70 Canadian companies are working on parts, an arrangement potentially worth billions of dollars over the course of a production run expected to reach some 3,100 planes, according to Canada’s industry association.

“The delays are not that frightening to companies, because they’re used to having to deal with delays and deal with the unknown,” says Harvey.

Initially predicted to cost $200 billion (U.S.) in 2001, making it the Pentagon’s most ambitious and costly purchase ever, the price of the F-35 project has almost doubled since then and is continuing to increase.

It began in the 1990s as the “next generation fighter,” and is known in Washington as the Joint Strike Fighter, or JSF. There are three versions of the F-35 in U.S. plans, an air force version, a navy model, modified to land on aircraft carriers, and an ambitious vertical takeoff aircraft for the Marines.

(Canada is buying the air force edition, customized for our purposes with a more adaptable airborne refuelling system, basically a better gas cap, and drogue parachutes to help slow the plane on landing on short or snow-covered runways.)

All three versions are supersonic, more nimble than current fighters, such as Canada’s aging F-18s, and, thanks to advanced stealth capabilities, almost invisible to enemy radar.

Such sophistication produces complex problems. One issue, for example, is the required 24 million lines of software code, writes Michael Sullivan, of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, in a recent report.

“JSF has about three times more on-board software lines of code than the F-22A Raptor and six times more than the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet,” says Sullivan.

“It’s a very complicated airplane,” says Howard Rubel, an aerospace and defence analyst based in New York. “You can’t do control alt delete at mach 1.5 and 35,000 feet. It does not work very well.”

Analysts like Rubel point out it’s the rule not the expectation that military aircraft projects blow budgets and timelines.

“This is the plane of the future and once it’s flying and widely used it’s going to be a great aircraft,” said Alexandra Ashbourne-Walmsley, of Ashbourne Strategic Consulting in London, England, which specializes in military contractors.

Take the Eurofighter Typhoon, she says. It was plagued by the same types of problems as the F-35, but is now a stalwart of Royal Air Force.

“I really want to fast forward a couple of years and have it in service,” said Ashbourne-Walmsley of the F-35, “I’d really like to see an international operation, like another Syria, Libya, or Iran, god forbid, where everyone is using the same aircraft. That will be a new way of fighting.”

When the United States began the JSF project, it wasn’t only an invitation for allies to invest in a state-of-the-art aircraft, but a chance for close cooperation with a world superpower.

Unlike past aircraft, the F-35s were developed by an international consortium of nine different countries who submitted designs, money and parts to build the plane.

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Canada has enthusiastically participated in its development since its inception, the result of a strong endorsement from the federal government.

“Not only were you going to have some say in how the airplane was going to develop, more to the point your aerospace industry was going to have a piece of the action,” said David Bercuson, a University of Calgary military historian. “In a sense what you were doing was joining an airplane club.”

As soon as Canada signed the first-phase memorandum of understanding in 1997, said Bercuson, “we were beginning a process of excluding anything but the F-35.”

Companies began bidding aggressively for work under the direction of Michael Slack, the Department of National Defence’s manager for the F-35 project.

“Ultimately, the projected importance of JSF to Canada’s aerospace industry and economy were essential in winning parliamentary approval for JSF participation, as Canada’s political climate typically shuns aggressive military policy, large defence programs, and major weapons acquisitions,” said a 2003 U.S. Department of Defense report on F-35 industrial relations.

Recently, those industrial benefits were attacked by Auditor-General Michael Ferguson in his latest report, who said the Department of Defense’s projections were “optimistic.”

Yet the $435 million (U.S.) in contracts awarded to firms such as Honeywell Canada and Heroux-Devtek for parts — from wing pieces to sensors — indicate the groundwork is set for long-term partnerships, the kind where the million-dollar contracts evolve into billion-dollar ones.

Experts say the current scandal is less about costly planes than it is about Canada’s oblique military procurement process.

“The one office that was supposed to really hammer them and question them and not let it move forward, wasn’t doing its job,” says Philippe Lagassé, an assistant professor of defence policy at the University of Ottawa.

“At this point I think you do need to focus more on the minister and what was going on at Department of National Defence,” says Lagassé, “that’s a larger problem than the F-35.”

If Canada’s order of fighter planes were to be cancelled, the aerospace industry would suffer, says Ashbourne-Walmsley, the military analyst.

“It would be harder for some of Canada’s brilliant defence companies to get business in America — in the short term,” she says.

“But if I were working for AIAC I’d be quite sort of twitchy if Canada were to abandon the JSF program.”