Reserve Pilots in a Spin Over Navy Plans to Replace P-3

With its four propellers and boxy airframe, the Lockheed P-3 Orion looks like an airplane whose glory days ended when Dwight D. Eisenhower was President.

But the 1950s-vintage aircraft is still rolling off Lockheed production lines, having gained a loyal following among naval aviators and an entrenched position in Pentagon budgets for more than a quarter of a century.

So, when the Pentagon recently decided to kill the program, the quiet and non-controversial P-3 program became the focus of a heated debate.

Nowhere has greater concern been expressed than in the Naval Reserve, which on a part-time basis operates 35% of the Navy’s fleet of 333 P-3s, a submarine-hunting and -killing aircraft that is a military version of the Electra airliner produced by Lockheed during the 1950s.

Over the years, Lockheed and the P-3 reservists have become what many Navy and congressional experts call “soul mates,” a relationship that has become so close that it has raised eyebrows in a few quarters.

A reserve admiral recently fired off a letter reportedly saying, among other things, that a private association of Navy reservists is supporting continued production of the aircraft partly because Lockheed is an advertiser in the group’s magazine.

The group is the Naval Reserve Assn., and the letter prompted its president, retired Navy Capt. Pat Lucci, to say in an interview: “That’s a bunch of hogwash. Are we supposed to say to Lockheed, ‘No, we won’t accept your advertising because you make the P-3 and we support it?’ Ours is a good magazine and a good one to advertise in.”

The alleged “hogwash” cited by Lucci was written by recently retired Rear Adm. Ted Levy, who apparently was speaking on behalf of a number of reserve officers, according to six Navy reserve flag officers who read the letter.

Levy declined to comment on the contents of the letter, other than to call it a piece of private correspondence addressed to one individual in the association. But the “private” letter has received wide distribution among reserve officers and has exposed some raw nerves, according to officers who would speak only if their names were not used.

Many reservists openly acknowledge that P-3 aviators have forged a very tight relationship with Lockheed over the years and that the reserve association has become a major advocate for P-3 funding.

“When you have the same contractor for 25 years, there is going to be a close relationship,” said Lester R. Smith, a retired rear admiral and a vice president of the association. “The contractor has reps from the plant out in the field. They have safety meetings back at the plant. There is a lot of association, and association breeds close relationships.”

Even procurement executives in the Navy have seen the relationship grow.

“There is a loyalty to Lockheed,” acknowledged Rear Adm. Robert L. Leuschner, director of anti-submarine warfare in the Naval Air Systems Command. “There is a loyalty to tradition. There is a loyalty to the aircraft. But is that any reason to go on when we see it has fallen short? The P-3 is 25-year-old aircraft technology.”

Although the issue might be considered a minor squall among insiders in the often-contentious arena of defense procurement, it illustrates how major support for long-running defense programs often results from relationships built up over many years and from special groups outside the main military commands.

The military role of the Naval Reserve is not well known, but it is a formidable force of more than 132,000 individuals who are among the United States’ most experienced fighters. And nowhere is the Naval Reserve more important than in its maritime patrol for the 300 submarines deployed by the Soviet Union, which are one of the greatest threats to the United States and the Navy.

The P-3 finds submarines by dropping sonar devices that transmit signals back to the airplane and by looking for magnetic fields created by the hulls of submarines. Once a submarine is located, the P-3 can drop torpedoes, bombs or mines out of its bomb bay. It is called a patrol aircraft, but it is just as much a bomber.

As capable as the aircraft is, the P-3 fleet is getting old and as many as 200 of the aircraft will have to be retired during the 1990s. The Navy is working on a replacement aircraft, to be available in the early 1990s, known by the unwieldy name of the Long-Range Air Anti-Submarine-Warfare Capability Aircraft. Pending selection of a contractor to produce LRAACA (pronounced la-RAKA), the Navy wants to end production of the Lockheed plane. The Navy plans to buy 125 LRAACAs.

But, to many, the idea of stopping and then restarting a big production program seems risky because, in an era of tight budgets, Congress may never restore the funding.

“We use the P-3 to hunt Russian submarines, and those submarines are a growing threat,” a Naval Reserve Assn. officer said. “Any defense-oriented individual would ask, ‘Why are we killing this program?’ unless a higher authority said, ‘No, you won’t ask. You have your marching orders’.”

That “higher authority” is the leadership of the active-duty Navy, which has sole authority to procure equipment for the reserve. All the reserve can do is advocate in its own interest and rely on private associations to lobby for it.

Lobbying Hard

The Naval Reserve Assn. has been lobbying hard for continued production of the P-3 and in some cases taking on the Navy establishment, much to the Navy’s chagrin.

An article in the May issue of Naval Reserve Assn. News, the association’s magazine, termed the Navy’s handling of the P-3 program “crisis management” and added: “The Naval Reserve Assn. believes that actions to terminate P-3C procurement now, in favor of an ill-defined acquisition plan of unknown cost (referring to the LRAACA) . . . is both premature and unnecessarily risky.”

The article prompted Leuschner, the active-duty anti-submarine warfare chief to say: “There’s no question those are pretty strong words. But I believe in healthy debate.” He added: “I have no doubt that the closeness with Lockheed has driven some of the debate.”

Many groups of pilots develop close relationships with the defense contractors that produce their planes, but the P-3 is an unusual case. It is the Navy’s only combat aircraft that operates from land bases, rather than being based on aircraft carriers.

“Being land-based means they are not part of the blue-water Navy,” said a retired admiral who asked not to be quoted by name. “They do an important job, but they are not part of the hot-shot Navy. So, they have tended to look to the contractor for support instead of their own service.”

Lockheed officials do not deny that the company’s relationship with the aviators who fly the P-3 has grown close. “The P-3 is a very safe airplane. The wives of P-3 pilots like their husbands to fly in Lockheed products,” a company official said.

But the close relationship is taken a little bit differently in Congress.

“It is arguable whether a proper arms-length relationship has been maintained between Lockheed and the P-3 community,” a key congressional staff member said. “I can see how the environment was such that they became soul mates. The P-3 community in the Navy is the bastard child at the family reunion.

“They are shore-based and get treated like they are the Air Force. They are not macho because they don’t fly off carriers. They sleep ashore in beds with sheets on them,” he said.

Of course, the Navy discourages such thinking, but officials do not pretend that it doesn’t exist.

“If you went to happy hour on a Friday night at Mira Mar (the Navy jet fighter station in San Diego) and asked if P-3 pilots are second-class citizens, you’d get a universal ‘yes’,” Leuschner said. “That is individual parochialism. You are not going to find that attitude at the levels where it counts.”

If the Navy’s active-duty P-3 fliers are somewhat isolated, then the P-3 reservists are doubly so. Generally, the reserve operates the oldest P-3 aircraft, designated the A and B models, handed down from the active-duty Navy. These airplanes have so many hours on their tired airframes that 137 are due to be retired by 1995.

The Navy effort to kill the P-3 has encountered a lot of entrenched opposition, however, and a surprising lack of interest by competitors that might take Lockheed’s place as the producer of the P-3.

The impetus to end P-3 production originated several years ago when Rear Adm. Stuart Platt, whose job was to advocate competition in Navy procurement, convinced Navy Secretary John Lehman that the Navy was getting a bad deal out of Lockheed’s decades-old role in building the plane.

“We found ourselves with a monopoly supplier, and I was interested in bringing to bear the pressures of the marketplace,” Platt, now a maritime executive in San Francisco, said in a recent interview. “There has been a long-term romance with the P-3, much like with the biplane.”

As much as Platt and Lehman wanted a competition, however, other aerospace firms had little interest in bidding to become P-3 producers because of the obvious advantage Lockheed had in building the plane. Moreover, Lockheed asserted that it owned the design rights to the P-3 because it was based on its own Electra.

The only way the Navy could generate industry interest was to allow other aircraft designs to be offered, and that gave birth to the LRAACA program. Lockheed officials, meanwhile, argue that a new design is bound to cost far more than the existing aircraft.

Leuschner said the decision to discontinue the P-3 was made to “unburden” the Navy of P-3 production costs and to shift spending to development of a new aircraft. Moreover, he said, the P-3 has fallen short of its required range because of the added weight of new electronic equipment it carries.

A “long-range” patrol aircraft should be able to hunt submarines 1,600 miles from its base and stay on station for four to five hours, he said. The P-3 can fly out only 1,200 miles from its shore base before beginning its patrol.

Lockheed’s Response

Lockheed officials say the Navy never required the P-3 to meet a 1,600-mile patrol radius requirement, and that it was not until recently that such a requirement was imposed.

“The whole reason used to shut the P-3 line down was to bring (other contractors) . . . into the competition,” said a Lockheed official who asked not to be otherwise identified. “Why should taxpayers pay more for the product?”

Lockheed has already absorbed one big defeat by Boeing last month when the Navy awarded that company a $1-billion program for new electronic gear for P-3s and LRAACAs. Of course, the future contracts for production of 125 LRAACAs will be much larger, carrying a potential cost of $5 billion to $10 billion.

Lockheed is expected to bid for the LRAACA with an updated P-3, and Boeing and McDonnell Douglas are planning bids with substantially modified versions of one of their passenger jetliners. Such a conversion will require building a bomb bay, and that means modifying the air frame so there is a large pressure bulkhead where one does not now exist.

In the end, whatever design and producer is chosen, the LRAACA will be more expensive than the P-3, Leuschner acknowledged.

Some Naval Reserve officials are worried that the end of the P-3 program will ultimately mean the end of production of land-based anti-submarine patrol aircraft. “How are we going to afford the LRAACA when we can’t even afford to buy all the P-3s we need now?” one reserve officer asked.