Ready or not

Air Force’s information age is touching down

I shouldn’t have been if I had thought about, but I was quite surprised to see fuselage sections for no fewer than six RAAF F-35s on the production line at Northrop Grumman’s factory in Palmdale, California during a visit there in late January.

For over two years now the RAAF’s first two F-35A Lightning IIs have been flying from Luke Air Force Base in Arizona as part of the F-35 International Pilot Training Center there. And with the next eight RAAF F-35s due for handover in 2018, it does stand to reason that they would be entering production this year. But nonetheless seeing that most of those jets are already in production reinforces the fact the Australia’s F-35 acquisition is well and truly underway, that it is not, like it has seemed for so many years now since Australia first joined the program in 2002, something that was happening in some far-off distant future.