A fighter on the line

For almost as long as anyone can remember, fighters and bombers have been built like houses: one by one, each taking weeks, if not months, to come together.

But if all goes well, the newest jet in the nation's arsenal will be assembled more like a car: on a moving line in a process that the Pentagon hopes will dramatically cut costs and speed production.

"We're going to build one a day, which the industry hasn't seen in a while," said Randy Secor, deputy program manager for the F-35 Lightning II at Northrop Grumman Corp., which is to assemble the fuselage in Palmdale.

"We're going to revolutionize the way aviation is done," Tom Burbage, F-35 program manager for primary contractor Lockheed Martin Corp., said after the first test flight last month in Fort Worth.

The assembly line revives an approach last in vogue during World War II, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for the production of 50,000 military aircraft a year.

That required a massive buildup of the civilian workforce and a break with the traditional way of making planes. One aircraft plant operated by Ford Motor Co. used assembly line methods perfected by company founder Henry Ford to churn out bombers at the rate of one an hour.

Assembly line production was feasible back then because aircraft were far less complicated. It was decades before designers could even dream of such features as the F-35's ability to evade radar, get airborne using only 200 yards of runway, fly at supersonic speed and, as in one version, be able to take off and land like a helicopter.

But as planes grew in complexity and production was scaled back from the frenetic wartime pace, the aircraft conveyor belt went the way of the Ford Edsel.

Half a century later, knowing that more than 5,000 F-35 jets could be ordered, Northrop of Century City and Lockheed of Bethesda, Md., are looking at the past to build for the future.

The F-35 would be the only fighter to enter production in the next decade, and could even be the last piloted warplane aircraft bought by a U.S. military that is shifting to robotic planes and other means of delivering weapons to their targets.

The three basic variants of the F-35, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter, are intended to replace Air Force F-16s, Navy F/A-18s and Marine Corps AV-8Bs.