Hill's future

The kind of future Hill Air Force Base, Utah has is in question.

One of its main missions is depot repair of USAF F-35 aircraft. That is (or was) an assumed cash-cow to replace F-16 work over the years.

Hill has performed depot work on 3 F-35s since September. Interesting because development of the aircraft is far from done. This work is mostly mistake-jet fix-up.

The original F-35 plan was to have hundreds of F-35s delivered by now and, hundreds more in the near future. 2014 was to mark the first year of full-rate-production. The SDD phase would be over.

That is a lot of depot-repair money lost.

The general's comments about workforce issues are true. But, I suspect, not the way he thinks it is.

But Baker also said the base is not without its challenges, chief among them, he says, keeping a well-stocked workforce.

“A huge challenge for us is hiring personnel,” he said. “It takes a long time to hire folks and once you do bring them on, you’ve got to get them trained, you’ve got to get them security clearances — it’s just a long process to bring an employee on. It’s not like the commercial sector, where you can bring someone on immediately. It takes us months and months.”

At the same time, Baker said, people are retiring.

”It’s a constant battle,“ he said. ”Personnel is a constant challenge.“

Hill will also host the first active, USAF F-35 squadron. That is, one without a test mission.

===

-Time's Battleland - 5 Part series on F-35 procurement - 2013 
-Summary of Air Power Australia F-35 points
-Bill Sweetman, Aviation Week and the F-35
-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
-F-35 deliveries
-ADF's wacky F-35 assumptions
-Gauging performance, the 2008 F-35, Davis dream brief
-Aboriginal brought out as a prop
-Super Kendall's F-35 problem
-LM sales force in pre-Internet era