Although they did not meet their expected June delivery date, Eglin Air Force Base’s first two F-35 Joint Strike Fighters have completed their test flights and are in their final review to be accepted by the Department of Defense.Read it all but bet money that the usual suspects will be talking about missed delivery dates etc. All I ask is that either Lockheed Martin or the USAF come out with an explanation of why this is 'taking longer than expected'...are we talking about the monster called bureaucracy creeping into the mix or is it an issue with the airplane.
Representatives from Lockheed Martin, the main contractor building the fifth-generation fighter jet, said last month that the first F-35s were expected to arrive in June. Although Lockheed officials cannot provide a firm date, they now say the AF-8 and AF-9 — Eglin’s first two Joint Strike Fighters — will “arrive shortly.”
“What we’re finding is it’s taking a little bit longer and I’m not going down that path again and putting a month on it,” said Mike Rein, a spokesman for Lockheed Martin. “I will tell you very shortly in the scope of a 10-year program, we will be sending both AF-8 and AF-9 out to Eglin.”
Either way, you've been warned. Expect an Alpha Strike from several blogs that you probably read all covering this subject.
Well, those of us in the Eglin area are ready to see or rather hear, what we'll be dealing with as far as noise. Grew up near Robins during the B-52 basing and later KC-135 wing, so I am familiar with loud. :)
ReplyDeletequestion for you David. whats with the protest about the F-35 coming down there! i thought that was a big time pro-military town.
ReplyDeletewhat happened to change all that?
What I find most disturbing is that there is an LM "fact sheet" on the web dated June 6th that was still predicting delivery of these two planes in June and now three weeks later LM can't even name the month they'll be delivered.
ReplyDeletebogus dude. the fact sheet was published on this blog and you know it.
ReplyDeletelike i said in my post.
we don't know what the delay is for. i remember that the A330's to Australia were delayed because of paper work snafu's so don't go there with me.
Could be something as simple as the more they get into the program they're learning that mroe things need to be checked than they anticipated five years ago. This kind of thing happens in every development program. That's why they're called *development* programs. I agree though that Bill & Co. will conveniently forget that.
ReplyDeleteI remembered that you published the anticipated delivery dates but did not recall that you had published the LM fact sheet.
ReplyDelete@sferrin It is one thing to encounter a developmental delay, it would be another not to know that "more things needed to be checked than anticipated" just two or three weeks before a scheduled delivery, i.e. while those checks are supposed to be happening. That's what indicates a program management problem, not the delay itself.
@BB1984: Who said the *cause* of the delay just happened last week? It could be that due to something that happened months ago the delivery got bumped. The fact is, we don't know either way.
ReplyDeleteAs I said, as of June 6th LM was still predicting June delivery of these planes. While the cause of the delay may well have happened months ago, LM didn't know about the delay till the last week or two (at best) and still doesn't have a handle on it or they would have published a new target date. Again, the problem isn't the delay, it might not even be the cause of the delay which may well turn out to be something small, it's that LM still doesn't have enough control of the program to avoid surprises even after years of delay, reorganizations and re-planned time lines.
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