(Luft) Lockheed Martin F-35 - Lightning II

[Nightwatch]

Not A Big Surprise: The Marines' F-35 Operational Test Was Far From Operational

The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) has a damning report on the F-35B’s shipboard “Operational Test” trials that occurred last May. It paints a dismal picture of an aircraft that is so far from being “operationally capable” it’s almost comical at this point. As a result, it proves what many of us already know: the Marines’ declaration of F-35B initial operational capability made this Summer was a farce.

[...]

“Traditionally, declaring IOC has depended upon completing combat-realistic testing, as was the criteria for the F-22’s IOC declaration in 2005. The Marine Corps admits the “initial” deployments are several years down the road. F-35Bs will not be deployed to Okinawa until 2017 at the earliest, and won’t bedeployed on amphibious assault ships until 2018. It’s clear that the F-35B’s IOC declaration does not establish that any necessary combat capabilities have actually been achieved. It simply establishes that the Joint Strike Fighter Program Office and the Marine Corps were doggedly determined to reap the public relations benefits of meeting their artificial IOC deadline—even if in name only—no matter what.”

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The show must go on

hier auch noch mal ausführlicher:

The Marines’ F-35s Are Not Ready for Combat

Recent 'operational test' aboard USS 'Wasp' was no such thing

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Mein persönliches Highlight:

The F-35 has often been described as a “flying computer.” The plane’s computers generate massive amounts of logistics data, which needs to be transferred off the planes and transmitted back to their home stations. Crews on the ground found the Autonomic Logistics Operating Unit could not handle the 400 to 800 megabyte data downloads quickly enough to meet the timeline. For purposes of comparison, that’s three to 6.5 hours of YouTube videos.

After trying to transfer the files through several military computer networks both aboard ship and at military facilities ashore technicians finally resorted to driving off base and using commercial Wi-Fi. They had to burn the data to CDs, and then manually upload it to the Wasp squadron operating units to move the necessary files. Once those files were uploaded, they found “numerous errors” including missing files and inconsistencies between home station and deployed files that had to be corrected remotely by Lockheed Martin database administrators in Orlando and Fort Worth.

WTF?