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The Pentagon is accelerating production of Lockheed Martin Corp.'s F-35 jet even though the planes already delivered are facing "significantly longer repair times" than planned because maintenance facilities are six years behind schedule, according to a draft audit.
The time to repair a part has averaged 172 days -- "twice the program's objective" -- the Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog agency, found. The shortages are "degrading readiness" because the fighter jets "were unable to fly about 22 percent of the time" from January through August for lack of needed parts.
[...] The F-35 program office and Lockheed have identified steps to increase parts availability "to prevent these challenges from worsening" as aircraft numbers increase, the GAO said, but Pentagon documentation indicates "the program's ability to speed up this time line is uncertain."
The GAO also disclosed that the F-35B -- the Marine Corps version of the fighter that's scheduled to begin ship deployments next year -- won't have required maintenance and repair capabilities at sea and "will likely experience degraded readiness."
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday November 06 2017, @04:00PM (1 child)
"designed by patent lawyers and lobbyists"
Don't forget about all the ignorant officers at the Pentagon, who kept adding wishes on to this magical unicorn/dragon hybrid. They would add mutually incompatible wishes to the wish list, and the Fairy MilitaryIndustrialComplex would promise to bolt all that shit on there.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday November 07 2017, @02:49PM
It's not ignorance. They keep inflating their requirements so when budget cuts are brought to the table they'll always have plenty of leeway to negotiate. It also helps that when something goes wrong you can always point to last year's meeting saying "We would have been able to prevent this if only our budgets were approved"...
Though being fair, with the exception of the revenue services, everyone in the public (and many in the private) sector do this.
compiling...