F-35. 10,000 Flight Hours? That's really bad news.

via Examiner.

The U.S.-led F-35 Lightning II program has achieved a milestone of 10,000 flight hours, prime contractorLockheed Martin announced Oct. 9.
Through September, F-35s had flown 6,492 times for a total of 10,077 flight hours, the company said.
All three variants of the stealthy fighter jet contributed to the accomplishment: the conventional-takeoff-and-landing F-35A, the short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing F-35B and the carrier variant F-35C. The F-35, also known as theJoint Strike Fighter, is being developed for the U.S. Air Force, Marine Corp and Navy and for international partners. The U.S. military plans to begin fielding the aircraft in late 2015.
Lockheed Martin’s announcement came less than two weeks after the Pentagon’s inspector general released a report identifying a series of “quality assurance” oversight problems that “could adversely affect aircraft performance, reliability, maintainability, and ultimately program cost.” The government F-35 program office and Lockheed Martin countered that they have already fixed most of the problems outlined in the report.

Interesting.

10,000 freaking flight hours and its not ready for prime time yet.  Oh and consider this boys and girls.  Think about other programs that were killed in the crib that failed less than the F-35....

*  Comanche
*  FCS
*  EFV
*  MPC
*  F-22 (program was truncated at around 200 airplanes)
*  B-2

And those are just off the top of the head without any real research.

You wonder why I hate this program?

Its simple.

It costs too much, has delivered too little, is way too late and won't effectively combat our peer competitor in aerial warfare.

We're paying for a Ferrari with a 10 horsepower engine, with cheap plastic seats that has an AM/FM radio for entertainment.  Its weird, its obsolete and its not what we wanted. 

Thanks for this link Don!

Check this out people.  The Vanity Fair article was the program manager basically yelling, praying, begging for the program to be canceled and now this...
Chief tester Gilmore, Jun 19, 2013:

"Although mission systems testing has been able to keep pace with the program plans for generating sorties and accomplishing the test points, the program is falling behind in achieving progress in delivering capability. This lack of progress is caused in part by the need to add unplanned testing to evaluate problems, such as the 221 added points for dedicated testing of the helmet mounted display system, as well as for regression testing of new software loads delivered to flight test, where 366 test points have been added already in calendar year 2013 to evaluate four new software releases [now to be changed]. . .We haven’t actually tested any combat capability,” Gilmore told senators, adding that there may not be enough time or money for full testing of these crucial capabilities in 2018, as scheduled. . . .We need to have more rigorous developmental testing. We need to let that testing proceed before we make production decisions."
http://tinyurl.com/k2cjj4c 

Another official with the program saying for anyone to listen...stop this madness.  Stop production until we can get this thing fixed!!!!  If the Marine Corps had done the same thing with the EFV like the Pentagon is doing with the F-35 then we'd have all the vehicles bought and in the fleet before we had it working properly.  But we didn't do that.  So why are we doing it with a much more complex machine?  It makes no sense.