F-35 program manager Vice Adm. David Venlet said in an interview that building and testing the F-35 at the same time was a ‘miscalculation.’
“You’d like to take the keys to your shiny new jet and give it to the fleet with all the capability and all the service life they want. What we’re doing is, we’re taking the keys to the shiny new jet, giving it to the fleet and saying, ‘Give me that jet back in the first year. I’ve got to go take it up to this depot for a couple of months and tear into it and put in some structural mods, because if I don’t, we’re not going to be able to fly it more than a couple, three, four, five years.’ That’s what concurrency is doing to us.”
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Agreed!, …Increasing the program schedule for fatigue testing and testing in general is necessary for the survival of this program. Fix or not-fix $60M aircraft is our dilemma. Should the “affected” airframes be updated or restricted to testing and flight training? Moving some of the early SDD aircraft to additional fatigue testing and some of the early LRIPs to SDD flight testing may improve the concurrency dilemma. Innovating the testing with these changes appears to be the challenge to LM and the JSF program. We taxpayers are not going to accept waste form either DOD or their contractors without “our pound of flesh, it doesn’t matter whose!”.