[Paul Bunyan]

http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=55744

In exchange for a $140-160 million price tag per plane, the Israel Air Force will take delivery of planes that are not yet certified to carry any sort of weapon systems, are not certified for the entire flight envelope, and will almost certainly have to be upgraded to repair flaws that will only emerge during later flight tests.

In early December 2011, a US Department of Defense report about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) was leaked to the media.[1] The report, dubbed the "Quick Look Review" (QLR), was written by a committee that included some senior US defense establishment figures who were charged specifically with looking into the question of "concurrency," i.e., selling the airplane while the flight testing is still underway. The committee was set up in light of a less than glowing report about the flight tests submitted at the end of October.

Concurrent acquisitions have been part of virtually every large weapons acquisition project in the West in recent decades. The extended development and production timetables have always required the start of low rate initial production (LRIP) before the conclusion of all testing and sometimes even before the end of the final development. The assumption is that flaws that surface during testing can be fixed later in units manufactured in the early batches.

In the case of the F-35, this method has been stretched to unprecedented lengths. The plane’s developers relied on the fact that the development methods, particularly regarding the computer simulations – based on the experience with development of the F-22 at Lockheed Martin – would allow them to reach a design mature enough to begin procurement even before flight tests began. Thus, the first batch was ordered in FY 2007, even though flight tests only started in 2008. By FY2011, 88 planes had already been ordered and the acquisitions for the next few years are planned at the rate of 30-40 additional planes every year.

Toward the middle of 2011 it became clear that the flight tests were not progressing at the anticipated rate and indicated that the design of the three F-35 models was not as mature as had been expected. The bottom line of the QLR report was that while there is no reason to stop concurrent acquisition altogether, there are, in the language of the report, several problems with “major consequences” regarding continued production.