Plenty of USMC depot work...for non-working ....LRIP aircraft !

There is plenty of depot work to do at Cherry Point performing mods on USMC F-35Bs...

...that still have no credible, working, mission systems.

The commander said there is “a ton of work” going on right now on the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter at FRC East. He said FRC East is working on modifications to its fourth and fifth F-35Bs now.

“That work is progressing nicely,” Spratlin said. “By June or July of this summer, we’re trying to get to six stalls so if the training squadrons can do without them, we will bring those jets in to do those modifications.”

He said the Marine Corps is calling for 16 aircraft to have gone through modifications by July of 2015, which each aircraft requiring about 7,000 to 13,000 hours worth of work.

“That’s going to be tough,” he said. “We’re going to have to really scramble to make that work.”

Spratlin said that 10 of the aircraft will be for VMFA-121 out of Yuma, Ariz., and six more will be for operation tests and evaluations.

Amazing. The program barely got its Milestone-B back (after having it stripped). and now they are doing mods on a lot of LRIP aircraft that have no proof of go-to-war mission systems.

As an aside, USMC expects to fly the Harrier out to 2030.

In other news, via Inside Defense (subscription):

Air Force Budgets $1.4 Billion For F-35A Concurrency, Block Upgrade Costs

The Air Force's recently released fiscal year 2015 budget justification documents spell out the costs the service is ready to pay because of the unprecedented concurrency on the F-35 fighter program -- $1.4 billion over five years, with more to come, to address deficient parts and bring early production aircraft up to a more capable software block.

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-Time's Battleland - 5 Part series on F-35 procurement - 2013 
-Summary of Air Power Australia F-35 points
-Aviation Week (ARES blog) F-35 posts (2007 to present)
-U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) F-35 reports
-F-35 JSF: Cold War Anachronism Without a Mission
-History of F-35 Production Cuts
-Looking at the three Japan contenders (maneuverability)
-How the Canadian DND misleads the public about the F-35
-Value of STOVL F-35B over-hyped
-Cuckoo in the nest--U.S. DOD DOT&E F-35 report is out
-6 Feb 2012 Letter from SASC to DOD boss Panetta questioning the decision to lift probation on the F-35B STOVL.
-USAFs F-35 procurement plan is not believable
-December 2011 Australia/Canada Brief
-F-35 Key Performance Perimeters (KPP) and Feb 2012 CRS report
-F-35 DOD Select Acquisition Report (SAR) FY2012
-Release of F-35 2012 test report card shows continued waste on a dud program
-Australian Defence answers serious F-35 project concerns with "so what?"
-Land of the Lost (production cut history update March 2013)
-Outgoing LM F-35 program boss admits to flawed weight assumptions (March 2013)
-A look at the F-35 program's astro-turfing
-F-35 and F-16 cost per flying hour
-Is this aircraft worth over $51B of USMC tac-air funding?
-Combat radius and altitude, A model
-F-35A, noise abatement and airfields and the USAF
-Deceptive marketing practice: F-35 blocks
-The concurrency fraud
-The dung beetle's "it's known" lie


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