Greece Buying 30 More Lockheed-Made F-16s

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

December 13, 2005

Greece Buying 30 More Lockheed-Made F-16s

By Bob Cox, Star-Telegram Staff Writer

Greece has reached agreement with the U.S. government to buy 30 F-16 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Co. with an option to purchase an additional 10 aircraft.

The sale, which is contingent on Greece and Lockheed signing the contract, would extend F-16 production and hundreds of jobs at Lockheed’s Fort Worth plant through 2009. But it won’t save the jobs of hundreds of other F-16 workers due to be laid off in 2006.

Greece's order comes just in the nick of time for Lockheed, which had said it needed a firm sale before the end of the year to avoid a gap in the three- to four-year production cycle that would have resulted in higher costs and perhaps additional job losses.

The order is worth nearly $2 billion, with about $1.2 billion of that destined for Lockheed.

Lockheed officials are still hoping to land an additional order or two for F-16 jets in the next year that would extend production through 2010 or beyond. By that time, the company hopes to be accelerating production of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

"This will give us another year to get more sales from other countries,” Lockheed spokesman Joe Stout said.

Earlier, Lockheed believed that it had a firm deal with Pakistan for a sizeable F-16 order. But the Asian country’s government put the fighter plane acquisition on hold after an earthquake in the region Oct. 8 killed an estimated 70,000 people and left hundreds of thousands, if not millions, homeless.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kohler, head of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency which oversees foreign military sales, has said in published reports that he expects Pakistan to revise its plan to buy F-16s early next year.

India, meanwhile, is also a sales prospect. The Indian government has been soliciting proposals for a fighter jet deal from a number of bidders. The U.S. government has offered India both the F-16 and Boeing’s F/A-18 fighters.

The F-16 is probably not the front-runner for the India sale, but can’t be counted out, said aerospace industry analyst Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group.

"It’s arguably the most cost effective option, but in India that’s often the least likely,” Aboulafia said.

After boosting production to fill a backlog of orders, Lockheed has cut some 1,500 jobs from the F-16 production line in the past two years. An additional 300 workers have been notified they could be laid off in mid-January and the company has said additional job cuts could occur next year.

Total employment at the Fort Worth plant is about 15,100.

Greece’s Hellenic Air Force already flies a large number of F-16s. The country decided to buy additional F-16s in July, after canceling a plan to buy Eurofighter Typhoons.

Stout said the latest order from Greece represents the 50th time an F-16 customer has placed a subsequent order for the versatile, high performance but still relatively inexpensive fighter jet.