Bernie

(Eventually someone finds out its just a dead body)

So Australia may be stuck with the F-35.

One thing Lockheed Martin can do now is produce airframes and kick them out the door. The F-35 might not work for shit but they can be delivered.

The Defence wish of achieving air superiority in our region is a joke.

The F-35 will never be able to take on emerging air-to-air threats.

The same goes for the whole mix of emerging IADS.

The F-35 won't have the range and endurance. For example, an F-22 will go longer.

The F-35 is not just a little F-22.



While Defence uses a different metric to determine aircraft readiness, you have to break it down as follows.

Fleet availability. If you have 72 defective aircraft, how many are on the line, ready for missions; how many have mod's and refurbs going and how many are in for routine phase / ISO maintenance (every few hundred hours)?

Of those that are pencil-whipped as ready to fly up on the squadron ops desk, when they are scheduled for missions, how many don't break that day (thus breaking the flying schedule and maintenance plan)? This is the other metric known as mission capability or MC rates.

The JORD for the F-35 states high 90 percent MC rates.

Good luck... note that is with a real, finished, go-to-war aircraft. F-35s coming out of the factory today are nothing more than prototypes by any other name.

U.S. federal procurement law even agrees. Milestone C has to be in place to legally build low-rate-initial-production aircraft. Milestone C for this program, has not been awarded. As a reminder, milestone B was pulled once for program management incompetence and later given back via methods similar to this.

Tyranny of concurrency.

In dry environments, F-22s have achieved 100 percent MC rates when deployed. By plan this is usually good for up to 30 days.

So, the F-35 is ineffective for combat because of its obsolete joint operational requirement document and numerous flaws.

Currently its maintenance management system called ALIS is a disaster.

The F-35 is too expensive to own and operate. If you were to look at the cost per flight hour of the RAAF legacy Hornet, that which the F-35 is to replace, you can fly 3 Hornets for 1 F-35 and today, the legacy Hornet provides more diverse, proven worth.

Yet the people that put these words down, lie to the Australian public.

They are a big part of the problem.

Sir Richard Williams is rolling in his grave knowing people are misusing his name for a fraud.


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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
-F-35's air-to-air ability limited
-F-35 Blocks--2006 and today
-The F-35B design is leaking fuel



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