Thread: BROKE: British tanks to be sent to Germany for storage so army can sell land in UK

DOCUMENTRY ON F-35 JOINT STRIKE FIGHTER PART 5



Sep 11, 2010

Military experts including WINSLOW T. WHEELER & PIERRE SPREY Explains why the f-35 will not cut it on the modern battlefield.

what you see going on is everybody backing out gracefully and then RUNNING LIKE HELL from a doubly Inferior Jet to thier Russian and Chinese counterparts

and you are being ROBBED BLIND to pay for a PIECE OF CRAP

Broke in the Wallet and Broke in the Head .... and I do believe you have a false sence of security ... its gotta be that ... why in the hell else would ya be in attack the world mode. Hundreds of Billions already spent on a pretty sitting duck while your kids go hungry

Whodafricken thunkit

New jet fighters can't land on carriers
LONDON, Jan. 16 (UPI) -- British Royal Navy officials said the inability of new Joint Strike Fighter jets to land on aircraft carriers could scrap the $7.6 billion fighter program.

The "F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Concurrency Quick Look Review," a document leaked from the U.S. Pentagon, indicates the jets failed to land on aircraft carriers in eight simulations because the "arrestor" hook, which stops the jet during landings, is too close to the wheels, The Daily Telegraph reported Monday.

Navy sources said the flaw could lead to the entire fighter program being scrapped, despite the billions of dollars spent by Britain, the United States and other "partner nations."

A Ministry of Defense spokesman declined to comment on the leaked report, but said Defense Secretary Philip Hammond met with U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to "discuss a number of issues including the Joint Strike Fighter" last month.

Jim Murphy, the Labor Party's shadow defense secretary, called for details details of the report to be made public.

"An island nation like ours should be able to operate airplanes from an aircraft carrier," he said. "The government must come clean on the full impact of the defense review. It's essential we know how long we will be without carrier strike capability."

New jet fighters can't land on carriers - UPI.com

Royal Navy spends £50bn on new fighter jets... but they can't even land on aircraft carriers

By Anthony Bond
Last updated at 3:44 PM on 15th January 2012Comments (229)

A new fighter plane which is to be used by the UK and U.S. military has a design flaw which prevents it from landing on aircraft carriers, it has emerged.

The flaw in the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) will come as a huge embarrassment to the Royal Navy which is expected to take delivery of 50 of the planes by 2020 at a cost of about £5 billion.

Leaked documents from the Pentagon have revealed that the arrestor hook of the JSF - which is used to stop the plane during landing - is too close to the wheels.

Problems: The newest version of the Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35C, (pictured) has a design flaw which means it cannot land on aircraft carriers

According to The Sunday Times, the Pentagon report reveals that eight simulated landings have failed and it says a 'significant redesign' of the aircraft is needed.

It says the future of the aircraft is at risk.

The Ministry of Defence (MOD) has refused to comment on the leaked report but a spokesmen told the newspaper that defence secretary Philip Hammond has discussed the issue with the U.S government.

The spokesman insisted that Britain 'remains committed to purchasing the carrier variant of the JSF.'

Arrestor cables are used to rapidly decelerate fighter jets as they land on aircraft carriers.

Talks: Defence secretary Philip Hammond has discussed the issue of the F-35C with his U.S counterpart Leon Panetta

The cable catches onto a hook at the back of the aircraft which stops the plane from overshooting into the sea.

But it has emerged that on the F-35C - the new carrier variant of the JSF - the arrestor hook is just 7ft from the rear wheels of the jet resulting in the arrestor missing the hook.

On aircraft currently with the U.S navy, this distance is 18ft which means it has plenty of time to catch the cable.

The leaked report - called the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Concurrency Quick Look Review - now warns that there could be major consequences to the aircraft's structure because of the design flaw.

It goes on to warn that the entire F-35C programme may have to be scrapped if a redesign is to costly or results in too many technical issues.

The report also revealed a number of other areas of concern which included that it may be unable to fire British Asraam air-to-air missiles.

According to The Sunday Times, the report adds that there was a high likelihood of future failures which had not yet been identified.

The government was criticised when it scrapped the Royal Navy's Harrier aircraft in 2010.

The shadow defence secretary Jim Murphy, told the newspaper: 'An island nation like ours should be able to operate aeroplanes from an aircraft carrier. It's essential we know how long we will be without carrier strike capability.'

Royal Navy spends £50bn on new fighter jets that can't even land on aircraft carriers | Mail Online

The Term SIMPLETON Comes To Mind

UK aircraft carrier to be sold to raise cash

British aircraft carrier to be sold to raise money as Royal Navy face military budget cuts



FILE - This is a Thursday, July 1, 2004 file photo as sailors man the rails on the Royal Navy's aircraft carrier HMS Invincible as it gets some help from tugboats for docking at Pier 88 in New York City . The Royal Navy is selling the HMS Invincible aircraft carrier to raise money in the face of impending budget cuts. The decommissioned carrier that played an important role in the Falklands War would make an ideal Christmas gift for the person who has just about everything. The vessel will be auctioned on a military disposal website. No price has been set. (AP Photo/Ed Bailey, File)

On Tuesday November 30, 2010, 10:57 am EST

LONDON (AP) -- The Royal Navy is selling a decommissioned aircraft carrier to raise money in the face of impending military budget cuts.

The HMS Invincible, which played an important role in the 1982 Falklands War, will be auctioned on a military disposal website. No price has been set.

The military said in a statement Tuesday that all options -- including the sale of equipment -- will be considered during these challenging financial times.

The Invincible was decommissioned in 2005 after 25 years of active service. Prince Andrew was based on it during the Falklands War when he served as a helicopter pilot.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/UK-aircra ... l?x=0&.v=1

A British fleet with no aircraft carrier. Unthinkable!

Britain is about to become a different country - the loss of the Ark Royal is the least of it

Ian Jack The Guardian, Friday 22 October 2010
Comments 78


The Ark Royal departs for sea trials from Rosyth dockyard under the Forth rail bridge. Photograph: David Cheskin/PA

One of my presents for the Christmas of 1956 was a fat little book called All About Ships and Shipping, edited by EP Harnack and very nicely got up by Faber & Faber with semaphore flags and rolling waves impressed on its blue cloth binding. Its prettiness helps explain its survival in boxes and cupboards for more than half a century, its original tuition (example: how to tell a barque from a brigantine) long forgotten. This week I took it out to look at the Royal Navy's fleet list in that long-ago era. Classes were lined up below their different silhouettes: cruisers, minelayers, destroyers, frigates, monitors, minesweepers, torpedo boats. There was still one battleship in service, the Vanguard, a turreted shape I can just remember seeing through a North Sea mist, but the biggest surprise was the number of aircraft carriers: Ark Royal, Eagle, Indomitable, Illustrious, Implacable, Indefatigable, Formidable … their bulldog names went on over two pages. There were 22 in all, and even if only half of them were actually sailing the high seas, the rest would have been mothballed with engines and guns greased and ready for war.
Very soon, when the Ark Royal and its Harrier jets are scrapped, the Navy will be left for the next 10 years without a ship capable of flying aircraft, until the first of the two carriers now under construction is commissioned. The entire surface fleet will amount to no more than 19 warships; my little book tells me that one class of destroyers alone, the C class (Cavalier, Cossack, Crispin), had more. My point isn't to contest the wisdom of shrinking the fleet – I'm not a military strategist – but to suggest how much can change in a lifetime and not be registered as change until an incredible event occurs (incredible, that is, to people of a certain age, background and disposition). It comes as a kind of assault on the memory. A fleet without an aircraft carrier! My short-trousered, ship-watching self would have boggled at the impossibility. But all the while since the navy has been losing dockyards, ships and crew – like a long, lulling sentence punctuated with commas and waking up finally with an exclamation mark.
But the end of the Ark Royal is the least of it. Britain is about to become a different country. Everybody agrees about this, with varying degrees of exultation or foreboding depending on their reading of government policy: a pulling back from the brink or a tip forward into the abyss, a leaner, fitter and more dynamic country or a smaller, meaner, more divided one. This kind of political rupture to the drift of national life is rare in peacetime history. It happened under the governments formed in 1945 and 1979, but the other big postwar date (1956, the year of Suez and my nautical Christmas gift) affected Britain's idea of itself more than the texture of ordinary lives. Never again could the state pretend to imperial power, but the people who lived in it trickled around this fissure like ants, and grew slowly but steadily richer.
Next month the British Film Institute launches a retrospective of documentaries that were made during that 30-year era known as the postwar settlement. Boom Britain, the season's overall title, strikes a deliberately historic note that wouldn't have worked four or five years ago, when it could just as easily have labelled a season by current filmmakers rather than those working between 1951 and 1977. But the title turns out to be not entirely accurate: some films shine with the classic boom qualities of confidence and optimism, but others don't. They reflect concerns that are still current – the environment, women's rights, mental illness, lonely old age, abused children – and that perhaps offers the first lesson about any study of the past: that its division into tight little periods, each different to the next, can never be more than a crude and sometimes misleading generalisation.
This thought, in fact, inspired the BFI's retrospective. According to Patrick Russell, its curator, the project is an act of revisionism designed to correct and enlarge the conventional history of the British documentary movement. Roughly, this story goes as follows. In the beginning was a 1929 film about herring drifters directed by John Grierson, who coined the noun "documentary" to describe films that dealt in "the creative treatment of actuality". Under Grierson's influence, several young filmmakers emerged in the 1930s who were passionately committed to social change. The brilliant wartime propaganda of Humphrey Jennings made him the most famous of them. And then after 1945 came a "black hole", in Russell's words; Lindsay Anderson and his "Free Cinema" school made a few memorable films in the late 1950s, but by then television has staked ownership to the documentary technique. The phrase "British cinema documentary" came to mean a black and white collage of steam locomotives, slag heaps, women in grubby kitchens and men in flat caps, searchlights and bomb damage. Certainly, that's what it meant to me.
Of course, I should have known better. Anyone who grew up in the 1950s and 60s usually sat through a short, British-made non-fiction film at the cinema. We watched them impatiently – why were we learning about artificial fibre production when we'd paid to see Kirk Douglas? Later, we also watched them dubiously – what were the funders of these films, Shell or BP or the National Coal Board, trying in some insidious way to sell us? As it turns out, nothing very terrible. The BFI has made a four-DVD set (titled Shadows of Progress and soon to be released) and most films on it wear their sponsorship lightly; sometimes, as with a BP film on the world's finite resources, they're even antagonistic to its interests. There is just as much lyricism and sympathy to be found in them as in the prewar school, and their directors, photographers and scriptwriters deserve to be rescued from the charge that their backing by government agencies or big business necessarily compromised their art.
Sometimes, of course, it may have done. One of my favourites is Britain Today, made in 1964 for the Foreign Office to show abroad. James Cameron, whose last work as a great liberal journalist was a weekly column in the Guardian, wrote and narrated the script. The film marches us around the United Kingdom and, goodness, what a promising place it looks. One wishes one lived there. New car plants, schools and universities, new nuclear power stations, Trident jets and blue Pullman trains. "Nothing can stand still," says Cameron as wrecking balls tear down Glasgow tenements. "The useless old must go." There are some unexpected moments. The crowd singing Jerusalem at the Proms is remarkably decorous, standing still as they sing and waving no flags, but these scenes follow a sequence of young people jiving: "Britain is very old – and very young."
This is the film's trope. Britain is a country "sustained by its past … confident of overcoming the challenges in the long years to come". A different and unrelated Cameron could have spoken the same script yesterday. The facts may be different, count them as you will in naval fleets, public debt or balances of trade. But the rhetoric used to address Britain's problematic future never changes – it takes us forward or backwards to the new age.


Comment is free | The Guardian

Aircraft carrier and Harriers face 'immediate' axe in defence cuts ...

Hero Harrier pilot confronts David Cameron as 40,000 defence jobs go

Joe Murphy and Nicholas Cecil
19 Oct 2010



A HERO pilot facing unemployment today confronted David Cameron over defence cuts.

The Afghanistan veteran challenged the Prime Minister as he defended savings of 7.5 per cent. Royal Navy lieutenant commander Kris Ward said: “I am a Harrier pilot and I have flown 140-odd missions in Afghanistan, and I am now potentially facing unemployment. How am I supposed to feel about that, please, sir?”

The 80-strong fleet of Harrier jets will be decommissioned from early next year.

Speaking after a question and answer session at Permanent Joint Headquarters in north-west London, Lt-Cdr Ward, 37, added: “I understand that cuts have to be made, but I am not sure that these are the right cuts.”

The cutbacks will mean the loss of more than 40,000 defence jobs. Mr Cameron said: “We do have to make decisions for the future and there have been long discussions about this in the National Security Council.”

He thanked Lt-Cdr Ward for “everything”, but added: “I have listened to all the military advice, and the military advice is pretty clear that when we have to make difficult decisions, it is right to keep the Typhoon as our principal ground attack aircraft, working in Afghanistan at the moment, and it is right to retire the Harrier.”

The Prime Minister admitted that “difficult” decisions had been made in the strategic defence and security review as he addressed staff at the operations headquarters. But he insisted Britain would remain a “front rank military power”.

Lt Cdr Ward's father, retired Commander Nigel “Sharkey” Ward defended the Harrier jet today on which he has written a book.

He told the BBC: “The Navy Harrier ensured success in the Falkands.

“Our troops on the ground of course achieved that final success but without the Harrier it could not have happened.”

In today's landmark reshaping of the armed forces, civilian workers will bear the brunt with 25,000 posts to go out of a total of 40,000, including hundreds at the Ministry of Defence in Whitehall.

The Army will lose 7,000 military posts, the Royal Navy and RAF around 5,000 each. The grim figures on the human cost of the cuts emerged as Defence Secretary Liam Fox took to the airwaves to defend the extraordinary situation of Britain's aircraft carriers not having any UK planes on them for 10 years.

French and US aircraft may even be the first to operate off one of two new British aircraft carriers being built at a cost of £6 billion.

The replacement of the Trident nuclear deterrent is also being delayed, averting a major showdown between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives over its future. On Trident, Mr Fox said: “I do not believe that any of the measures that we take will in any way affect the effectiveness of our nuclear deterrent, nor our ability to have a continuous at-sea deterrent.”

Britain's special forces are due to get extra funding and there will be a £20 million boost to medical services.

Mr Cameron was today announcing that the Navy's flagship HMS Ark Royal will be scrapped early and the 80-strong fleet of Harrier jets will be decommissioned from early next year.

Britain's remaining aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious will be used as a platform for helicopters but is due to go out of service in 2014, leaving the UK with a maritime “capability gap”.

The new carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth was due to enter service in 2016 but this date may be delayed. The second carrier being built, HMS Prince of Wales, is due to be ready in 2019.

But one of them may be then mothballed and could then be sold off, possibly to India. The remaining aircraft carrier will be fitted with an electromagnetic system of catapults to launch planes and drag wires for landings.

Mr Fox insisted today it was not unprecedented for Britain to have aircraft carriers without jets. Tornado and Typhoon jets would allow Britain to project “air power”.

Asked about the situation where French rather than British planes may fly from one of the new carriers, he added: “You need to be looking not to the end of the decade but to the 35 to 40 years of life of the carriers, and to have inter-operability with our allies seems to me to be a priority in that period if we are to have effective alliances.”

Experts have criticised the military overhaul as “indecision-led” and “eccentric”.

The Lib-Con coalition is blaming the shake-up on £38 billion of military over-commitments inherited from Labour.

The £37 billion defence budget is being cut by 7.5 per cent but MoD insiders stress that this equates to around 16 per cent once the nine per cent because of the overspend from the previous government is taken into account.

An order for 25 Chinook helicopters is to be cut to 12. Britain's 20,000 troops in Germany will be withdrawn by 2020, with 10,000 out by 2015.

Mr Cameron was set to announce that Britain's military spending will not fall below two per cent of Gross Domestic Product, the minimum expected of Nato members.

Unions reacted angrily to the looming job cuts. Kevin Coyne, Unite national officer for the MoD, said: “MoD civilian staff in London play a vital logistical role in maintaining national security at a time of heightened alert.”

Mr Cameron spoke to President Obama last night before unveiling the strategic defence and security review. Last week, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Washington was “worried” by the scale of UK defence cuts.

But a Downing Street spokesman said the Prime Minister had promised President Obama that the UK would “remain a first-rate military power and a robust ally of the United States”.

It would “continue to work closely with the US on the full range of current security priorities,” he added.

The last strategic defence review in 1998 took more than a year, while this one has been carried out in five months, leading to accusations that the government has rushed the process.

It has been undertaken at the same time as the comprehensive spending review to be published tomorrow which is expected to see huge cuts to departmental spending across Whitehall.

Rear Admiral Terry Loughran, who was at the helm from 1993 to 1994 during the Bosnian conflict, said the decision to have no flight capability on aircraft carriers for up to 10 years would lead to a massive loss of skills.

He said the decision to adapt the new ships to host conventional aircraft rather than those with hover capabilities would lead to greater long-term costs. He added: “It is the scrapping of the Harriers that gives me the greatest concern and highlights that the review is far from strategic.”

THE NAVY
Two new aircraft carriers will be built at a cost of £6 billion but about 5,000 jobs will go. HMS Ark Royal will be retired early and the fleet of Harrier aircraft decommissioned. The second carrier, HMS Illustrious, will be used as a helicopter platform but is due to be retired in 2014. One of the two new aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, is expected to be mothballed in 2019 and possibly sold off. The other would be able to take conventional jets rather than vertical take-off aircraft. Four frigates will be axed as the surface fleet is cut from 24 to 19. An order for seven Astute Class hunter-killer submarines will go ahead and Trident is delayed.

THE RAF
The air force will lose some 5,000 military posts and at least two bases. RAF Kinloss in Scotland is seen as the most vulnerable. The new Nimrod MRA4 fleet is expected to be scrapped. The Tornado fleet will escape the immediate axe but be phased out with the introduction of new Typhoon and Joint Strike Fighter jets. But the number of Joint Strike Fighter planes is due to be cut from about 130 to 40. RAF bases could be used for soldiers returning from Germany.

THE ARMY
The Army is due to lose some 7,000 soldiers, more than 100 tanks and 200 armoured vehicles. The job losses are far lower than the 20,000 originally feared. Twenty thousand troops in Germany will be brought home by 2020. David Cameron has guaranteed that operations in Afghanistan will not be hit by the cuts. General Sir Peter Wall, the Chief of the General Staff, intervened at the 11th hour to oppose changes to training which he felt would affect the Afghan campaign. Special forces will get extra funding to buy cutting-edge communications technology and weapons.


London News | London Evening Standard - London's newspaper

Jan 29, 2010
http://www.youtube.com/user/PowerRossiya

Then Truth Revealed by the United States Department of Defense, the United States Air Force (USAF), the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) and the US RAND Corporation Research ANd Development, US and Australia Pacific Vision data.

The exercise PACAFs Pacific Vision on sept 25/08 revealed the United States air superiority is just a fantasy. The exercise was consisted of face the Red Team one hundred Su-27SM, four Su-30 and two Su-35 against Blue Team one hundred F-35, one hundred eighty seven F-22 and four hundred F/A-18E/F. The exercise showed the blue team higher in number of aircraft is double inferior when hundreds of Blue Forces aircraft were lost in the first 20 minutes downed by the Red Forces., on the other hand only 12 aircraft was downed in the Red Team.

Pacific Vision effect the production of the F-22 was canceled and the F-35 project not longer receives investment all since 2008 by Barack Hussein Obama II and Robert Michael Gates.

Watch why F-22 is canceled in the next link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL5jAxk94Ws

Watch Russian 5th gen stealth fighter Sukhoi T-50 PAK FA in the next link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJRZBJ_nQvk

Watch Chinese 5th gen stealth fighter Chengdu J-20 in the next link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slLtpOpg36I

Watch After the cancellation of the F-22 the few remaining units still cause frustration in the USAF in the next link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICnR09iOPNw

UK aircraft carrier plans in confusion as ministers revisit square one

Decision expected by Easter on which US joint strike fighter Britain will buy: ministers now want to revert to original choice

Richard Norton-Taylor
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 1 March 2012 14.21 EST


A US joint strike fighter. The UK is deciding whether to buy the cheaper 'cats and flaps' version or revert to the vertical-landing model. Photograph: Joely Santiago/AP

Britain's troubled and increasingly expensive plan to equip the navy with new aircraft carriers has been plunged into fresh turmoil as ministers consider reversing their earlier decision to change the type of plane that should fly from them, it has emerged.

The government announced in last autumn's strategic defence review that it had decided to buy the "cats and flaps" (catapults and arrester gear) version of the US joint strike fighter. This would have a "longer range and greater payload ... the critical requirement for precision-strike operations in the future", the government stated.

Moreover, the government added, it will be cheaper. It would also enable French planes to land on British carriers, and vice versa, inkeeping with the new UK-French defence spirit of co-operation.

Now, in an extraordinary volte-face, the Ministry of Defence says the "cats and flaps" planes may well be cheaper but it would be too expensive to redesign a carrier – more than £1bn – to accommodate them. The ministry is thus faced with the prospect of renegotiating a deal with the US, reverting to its original plan – namely buying the short take-off and vertical landing version of the aircraft, even though it is acknowledged to be less effective and more expensive .

The latest chapter in the troubled saga of Britain's future aircraft carriers – whose own estimated costs have soared – was raised on Thursday in a letter to the defence secretary, Philip Hammond, from Jim Murphy, his Labour opposite number.

Murphy referred to "worrying suggestions" that the government was about to change its mind about the kind of aircraft to buy from the US. "It is vital that there is now clarity on the government's plans for this vital area of the defence equipment programme," he wrote.

Murphy said the decision in the defence review to scrap the Harrier fleet meant the UK would have no carrier aircraft capability until 2020 – and then only one carrier would be operational.

Defence officials said that the government was "re-assessing" its earlier decision because, they indicated, of pressures on the defence budget.

HMS Queen Elizabeth, the first carrier, will be mothballed immediately it is launched in 2016, according to existing plans. The second, HMS Prince of Wales, will be able to put to sea by 2020, but it is not known how many planes will be able to fly from it – nor what kind.

The two carriers, originally priced at £3.5bn, are now estimated to cost £6.2bn. According to the Commons public accounts committee, the cost is likely to icrease to as much as £12bn.

The government, which originally said it wanted more than 100 joint strike fighters, says that it will have just six operational ones by 2020. The unit cost of the joint strike fighter, made by Lockheed Martin, has soared because of production problems and delays caused by US defence budget cuts. Britain's BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce have big stakes in a future deal adapting the joint strike fighter for British forces.

A spokesperson for the MoD said: "We are currently finalising the 2012-13 budget and balancing the equipment plan. As part of this process, we are reviewing all programmes, including elements of the carrier strike programme, to validate costs and ensure risks are properly managed. The defence secretary expects to announce the outcome of this process to parliament before Easter."

UK aircraft carrier plans in confusion as ministers revisit square one | UK news | The Guardian

Trillion-Dollar Stealth Fighter Cleared for Flight Training

Posted by: Dreier



The Air Force’s F-35A Joint Strike Fighter is finally cleared to begin introductory flights at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida — four months late.
The belated “Military Flight Release” is a big step forward for the stealthy JSF, which is slated to replace almost all of the Pentagon’s tactical jets over the next 30 years but has been plagued by design problems, safety concerns, delays and cost increases.

Initial flights by the first dozen planes will be “limited” and “scripted,” the Air Force said. Marine and Navy versions of the new warplane could also take to the skies over Eglin before too long. The flying will slowly become more realistic as Lockheed Martin improves the jets and pilots and ground crews grow more comfortable using them.

The military estimates buying and flying the full fleet of roughly 2,500 F-35s could cost $1 trillion over 50 years. A program review in November found 13 expensive design flaws, some of which had caused the F-35 to be briefly grounded last summer.

In October, Dr. Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester, asked the Pentagon to consider delaying training flights at Eglin until the late summer of this year — 10 months later than planned at the time. Rushing into training could endanger pilots’ lives, Gilmore said. “Historically, flight training has not commenced for newly developed aircraft until 2,000 hours to 5,000 hours of monitored flight test have been accumulated,” Gilmore wrote. At the time, the F-35 had accumulated just 1,000 hours of testing — a number that has since increased.

Air Force Lt. Gen Thomas Owen and Navy Vice Adm. David Venlet rejected Gilmore’s advice, but assured him that training would not begin until they were certain the JSF was ready. They believe that moment has arrived. “The Air Force, Joint Strike Fighter Program Office and other stakeholders have painstakingly followed established risk acceptance and mitigation processes to ensure the F-35A is ready,” said Gen. Donald Hoffman, the commander of Air Force Materiel Command.

The training will proceed at a crawl. “The plan will be to start flying, not training, but to start flying with test-qualified aviators initially to do what we call local area orientation,” Air Force Chief of Staff Norton Schwartz said. “We will build to a threshold, which will allow the training leadership in the Air Force to declare ‘ready to train’ with other than test-qualified aviators.”

Really, there’s no rush. As part of the Five-Year Defense Plan published early this month, the Pentagon announced it would further slow down JSF production to allow more time for testing. The single-engine fighter is now slated to enter front-line service no earlier than 2018, seven years later than originally planned.

That means six years of pilots training on a jet that isn’t ready for combat. But even that is an improvement over the current situation. Eglin’s 33rd Fighter Wing has been borrowing old F-16s while awaiting clearance to fly its F-35s. ”The most-frustrated pilot is one who isn’t flying at all,” Marine Col. Arthur Tomassetti told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.



> Pentagon Helps New Stealth Fighter Cheat on Key Performance Test <--- LINK

Trillion-Dollar Stealth Fighter Cleared for Flight Training « Zen Haven