On target?

Production pressures for the F-35

“There’s a lot happening all at once, there’s testing going on, the training is standing up, the first operational base is standing up – there’s a lot going on. ” So remarked Lockheed Martin’s Tom Burbage, executive vice president and general manager of the F-35 program during a brief with Australian journalists in Canberra in mid December.

“We have simultaneous activity going on in structural testing, in flight testing with production and sustainment development and we’re standing up the first operational base at Yuma for the Marine Corps. ” 2011 was certainly a busy year for the JSF program, in more ways than one. Lockheed Martin has been keen to point to the program’s successes, and there were many, but not surprisingly given the many moving parts of the JSF program – techni-cal, political and budgetary – the program remains as heavily scrutinised as ever, with as many critics as advocates.