Glowing statements abound for LM's latest financial report but the truth is that there are serious money problems with the F-35 program.
Over $60 billion later (this includes JSF efforts from pre-2001) and no example of a tested and complete go to war aircraft.
For those looking at history, we could have won WWII twice; the F-16 would have already been in operational squadron service; and we would have had a few trips to the moon under our belt.
But this is the new world of groupthink and real engineers (or engineering leadership) no esta en la casa.
It is rather amusing to be told that flight testing for the F-35 is going well yet in reality it is still delayed when compared to this 2007 schedule.
A sign of poor leadership is not taking ownership of a project.
“It is distinctly argued that a discovery in the program is not a deficiency or a fault of the contractor … These discoveries are not defects. They are a part of a learning process that is a very well established facet of an engineering system like this.”
Not true. Poor risk management; poor engineering leadership; gross over optimism; and concurrency warnings ignored.
The misleading statements didn't help either.
Those investors that haven't woken up might want to consider doing so now.
New t-shirts for the program are available.
