Too Much Too Soon?

“The [US] Department [of Defense] began the F-35 program confident that the benefits from a new generation of advanced design and simulation tools would provide a more mature system earlier in the test program than previously experienced in fighter development programs,” observes a Pentagon review into the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program.

“It was this expectation that led the Department to accept the economic risk of beginning low rate initial production concurrent with the development and test of the F-35 design with the implication that the need for rework of early procured aircraft would be modest. This assessment shows that the F-35 program has discovered and is continuing to discover issues at a rate more typical of early design experience on previous aircraft development programs, which calls into question the assumed design maturity which supported the decision to conduct significant concurrent production. ” That is the assessment of a ‘Quick Look Review’ into the F-35’s concurrency issue, dated November 29 and evidently leaked onto the internet.