Marine Corps leaders, increasingly concerned about replacing their current fleet of aging fighters, decided to skip the formal evaluation of the plane's operational utility that the Air Force is completing before proceeding with its own pilot training flights at the base.
"The Marines are determined to get this plane into the field as soon as it can be safely accomplished. They don't want to be slowed down by bureaucratic obstacles," said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute think tank.
I wonder which "bureaucratic obstacles" Thompson means? This set of "bureaucratic obstacles", or this set of "bureaucratic obstacles"?
Gilmore, the Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation, declined to comment on Wednesday on the Marine Corps' decision to skip the operational utility evaluation, according to his spokeswoman.
After all, according to Thompson and one of his pay-masters, Lockheed Martin, most of the F-35 troubles are the government's fault. So good to go ahead and get this done sooner. If a few $200M-plus mistake-jets are dumped in the process, well, the USMC survived the Osprey debacle. At least an F-35 mishap doesn't kill people by the bushel.
3 comments:
Not sure what exactly are Marines "training" to do? You only need a few hops to be able to fly the F35, they can't practice yet the vertical stuff and software for weapons systems and such isn't ready either...so what are they training for? Fly a circuit and learn how to use the radio?
Interesting little comment at the bottom has it that new carrier arrest testing has occurred, when will we get more info about results? I thought the testing was pushed back until later DEC 2012 to early 2013?
You're missing the silver lining for premature flight training here, which is that every mistake jet that crashes during training is one less jet that you have to pay to fix later.
Hopefully the ejection system is fully functional.
I see. We are spending gobs of dollars for training a supersonic STOVL flying club. Every day I see the genius in the Sequestration scheme. It is the only way to force the setting of priorities within a finite budget without the usual reelection fears from Congressmen...Genius, I tell you. It might save the Republic, if they don't mess with it.
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