F-35 over F-22?

[USCTrojanzNo1]

While I have absolutely no knowledge of this topic (I don't think I can tell the difference btwn an F-35 and an F-22), I agree with the others that it's nice to read something that isn't the usual hardcore APA topics.

The usual hardcore APA topics being IR disparity, model minority bashing, Asian discrimination, Asian bashing by the white media (which paradoxically praises us as the model minority), etc.

[raacluse]

Here's a pertinent news website:

www.defensenews.com


Also, with regard to cyberwarfare, what is the Obama admin. planning to do about cybersecurity? Appoint a czar, set up an office to coordinate policies, or what?

(Meanwhile, somewhat related to cyber stuff, you've got 2 Indian-Americans appointed to federal IT positions, one as Chief Info. Officer and another as Chief Technology Officer.)

[MarshalStealth]

Originally Posted by raacluse

Here's a pertinent news website:
www.defensenews.com

Also, with regard to cyberwarfare, what is the Obama admin. planning to do about cybersecurity? Appoint a czar, set up an office to coordinate policies, or what?

(Meanwhile, somewhat related to cyber stuff, you've got 2 Indian-Americans appointed to federal IT positions, one as Chief Info. Officer and another as Chief Technology Officer.)

It is a slow process. When it is a crisis, only then alpha objectives are done at a NY minute.

[Sunflare]

Originally Posted by raacluse

Also, with regard to cyberwarfare, what is the Obama admin. planning to do about cybersecurity? Appoint a czar, set up an office to coordinate policies, or what?

Most likely President Obama may appoint a czar to delegate direction over a newly formed committee that will take over partial responsibility from the NSA as far as cyber security is concerned. Of course, due to the sensitive information involving this latest development on cyber security, it may be hard to find a definite answer. However, according to various sources, the candidates may be:

1)John Thompson, CEO of Symantec

2)Richard Clarke, former chief counter-terrorism adviser on the NSC.

3)Howard Schmidt, president of the Information Security Forum.

4)Scott Charney, head of Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group.

These are unconfirmed rumors but that's what I know of so far, so don't quote me on this.

Originally Posted by MarshalStealth

It is a slow process. When it is a crisis, only then alpha objectives are done at a NY minute.

Probably more like an understandably classified process kept under wraps I guess, due to the sensitivities involved, given the situation with government agencies (such as the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, Homeland Security, etc.) being constantly under the threat of hackers from opposing nations. Really I'm pretty neutral about this for the most part, but just saying . . .

[MarshalStealth]

When it is all said and done, is it all said and done?

The defence industry
The last manned fighter
It is the most expensive military project ever. It is plagued by delays and menaced by budget cuts. Will the F-35 survive?
Jul 14th 2011 | from the print edition


LEON PANETTA is under no illusions about what Barack Obama moved him from the CIA to the Pentagon to do. The wily Mr Panetta, who took over from Robert Gates as defence secretary at the beginning of the month, is everyone’s idea of a safe pair of hands. But his greatest claim to fame (other than presiding over the plan to kill Osama bin Laden) is as the director of the Office of Management and Budget who paved the way to the balanced budget of 1998. Mr Panetta has inherited from his predecessor the outlines of a plan to reduce military spending by $400 billion by 2023. But America’s fiscal crisis (and the lack of any political consensus about how tackle it) makes it almost certain that Mr Panetta will have to cut further and faster than Mr Gates would have wished.

That could be bad news for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most expensive military-industrial programme in history, and its lead contractor, Lockheed Martin. The plane is expected to come into service six years late (in 2016) and wildly over-budget. The Pentagon still plans to buy 2,443 F-35s over the next 25 years, at a cost of $382 billion. But in a parting shot, Mr Gates gave warning that although he did not think the F-35 faced cancellation, “the size of the buy” might have to be cut.

After beating a Boeing design that was deemed technically riskier, Lockheed Martin signed the contract with the Department of Defence to develop the F-35 in 2001. It was an ambitious undertaking. The aim was to reap huge efficiency gains by replacing nearly all of America’s ageing tactical aircraft (the air force’s F-16s and A-10s; the navy’s A/F-18s and the marines’ AV8B jump jets) with three variants of one basic design. There would be a conventional take-off and landing (CTOL) version for the air force, a short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) version for the marines and a beefier carrier version for the navy.

With radar-beating stealth capability and a suite of advanced software and sensors, the F-35 would be a “fifth generation” fighter, far more effective in both its primary ground-attack role and air defence than “legacy” aircraft. (Respectively eight times and four times better, say Lockheed Martin executives, though by what measure is anyone’s guess.)

Burning banknotes

Above all, the F-35 was meant to be affordable. Development costs would be shared across the three versions and with eight foreign partners who were also buying and helping to build the F-35. Manufacturing scale economies were assured because more than 3,000 planes were to be sold—2,443 to Uncle Sam and the rest to his NATO allies. And because 80% of the parts were common to all three versions, maintenance and logistics would be simpler and cheaper. Deliveries of operational aircraft were to begin in 2010.

That was the idea, anyway. The F-35’s critics have long argued that its performance is compromised by having to fulfil too many roles and that an over-complicated design lashed to an over-optimistic schedule was asking for trouble. In the past 18 months, as delays have mounted and costs escalated, even some of the plane’s ardent fans have become alarmed. In 2009 the Pentagon realised that a breach of the Nunn-McCurdy rules on over-budget defence-procurement programmes was inevitable, because costs would exceed the original baseline by more than 50%. An internal report declared: “Affordability is no longer embraced as a core pillar.”

Anticipating the breach, in March 2010 Mr Gates restated his support for the F-35, but hit out at “unacceptable delays and cost overruns”. He said he was “fundamentally restructuring” the programme, adding more money and time for development. He also withheld $614m in performance payments to Lockheed Martin, tying its future earnings to specific criteria rather than the subjective ones that he believed had stiffed the taxpayer.

In January this year Mr Gates made a series of further announcements which included spending another $4.6 billion on development, slowing down initial production to avoid building aircraft that would later have to be expensively upgraded and putting the marines’ STOVL version on two-year “probation” because of problems with the aircraft’s structure and propulsion system. Condemning the failure to get costs under control, which he blamed partly on the lack of financial discipline in the defence department during George Bush’s presidency and partly on execution failures by Lockheed Martin and its partners, Mr Gates said that “the culture of endless money that has taken hold must be replaced by a culture of restraint”.

The latest cost estimates from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), published in May to coincide with a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the F-35 programme, were shocking. The average price of each plane in “then-year” dollars had risen from $69m in 2001 to $133m today. Adding in $56.4 billion of development costs, the price rises from $81m to $156m. The GAO report concluded that since 2007 development costs had risen by 26% and the timetable had slipped by five years. Mr Gates’s 2010 restructuring helped. But still, “after more than nine years in development and four in production, the JSF programme has not fully demonstrated that the aircraft design is stable, manufacturing processes are mature and the system is reliable”. Apart from the STOVL version’s problems, the biggest issue was integrating and testing the software that runs the aircraft’s electronics and sensors. At the hearing, Senator John McCain described it as “a train wreck” and accused Lockheed Martin of doing “an abysmal job”.

What horrified the senators most was not the cost of buying F-35s but the cost of operating and supporting them: $1 trillion over the plane’s lifetime. Mr McCain described that estimate as “jaw-dropping”. The Pentagon guesses that it will cost a third more to run the F-35 than the aircraft it is replacing. Ashton Carter, the defence-acquisition chief, calls this “unacceptable and unaffordable”, and vows to trim it. A sceptical Mr McCain says he wants the Pentagon to examine alternatives to the F-35, should Mr Carter not succeed.

How worried should Lockheed Martin be? The F-35 is the biggest biscuit in its barrel, by far. And it is not only Mr McCain who is seeking to knock a few chocolate chips out of it. The bipartisan fiscal responsibility and reform commission appointed by Mr Obama last year said that not all military aircraft need to be stealthy. It suggested cancelling the STOVL version of the F-35 and cutting the rest of its order by half, while buying cheaper F-16s and F-18s to keep numbers up. If America decided it could live with such a “high-low” mix, foreign customers might follow suit.

The danger for Lockheed Martin is that if orders start to tumble, the F-35 could go into a death spiral. The fewer planes governments order, the more each one will cost and the less attractive the F-35 will be. This happened to the even more sophisticated and expensive F-22. By cutting its order from 750 to 183, the Pentagon helped to drive the programme cost per aircraft of the F-22 up from $149m to $342m.

Lockheed Martin’s investors doubt this will happen to the F-35: the share price has been remarkably stable over the past two years. Tom Burbage, the executive who helped run the F-22 programme and who has also been in charge of the F-35’s development from the start, is still in charge—evidence that the company thinks he is doing a decent job. Mr Burbage says that a programme as big as the F-35 is bound to attract barbs. The main cause of the delays and cost over-runs, he says, is a problem with the weight of the STOVL version that came to light in 2004. It was impossible to continue work on the other two variants while this was being dealt with, he says. The plane was slimmed by 2,700lb (1,225kg), but this severely disrupted the supply chain that Lockheed Martin had put together with its main partners (BAE Systems and Northrop Grumman). That set the project back by nearly two years. On the bright side, Mr Burbage says that applying a similar diet to the other two variants yielded better planes.

Mr Burbage is also confident that once production at the firm’s mile-long factory in Fort Worth ramps up to 17 aircraft a month, as planned, the more pessimistic unit-cost projections will start to fall. That, however, remains a distant prospect while the design of the aircraft keeps changing.


Even so, Mr Burbage points out that the fixed-price contract agreed with the Pentagon for 32 aircraft in the fourth production lot (including a 13% margin for Lockheed Martin) is half the price of the first lot of aircraft. Mr Burbage predicts that the average cost of the air force version will eventually be around $65m—about the same as the F-16 sells for today. One reason for the much higher Pentagon forecasts is that the cost is built up to include every contingency, including projecting inflation over the whole production cycle.

In other words, the Pentagon and its contractor calculate future costs in completely different ways. That vertigo-inducing $1 trillion figure is so high because it covers such a long period—the government changed its initial cost projections to cover 50 rather than 30 years. It also increased the number of bases the aircraft would be stationed at from 33 to 49.

Mr Burbage rejects the assumption that the F-35 will cost a third more to sustain than the F-16s and F-18s it is replacing. He says that if you applied the same measures to legacy fighters the cost would be up to $3 trillion. He also remains convinced that the cost-saving ideas that first gave birth to the F-35 remain valid—commonality of spares, quick and easy replacement of components, advanced diagnostics and so on. Together they add up to a plane that will be twice as reliable as its predecessors and require fewer hands to maintain. Yet none of these benefits has been factored in because none has yet been proven.

Even if Mr Burbage is too sanguine, the F-35 is in no imminent danger. Its position is strengthened by two inarguable propositions. The first is that many of the current generation of fighters are approaching 30 years in service and must soon be replaced. The second is that because the F-35 was designed to replace so many types of aircraft, it has, in effect, a monopolist’s grip on the future fighter market.

Even if America and some of its NATO allies cut their orders, Lockheed Martin is confident that the numbers will be more than made up by countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. All these nations are rich and nervous of Beijing. Mr Burbage draws comparison with the F-16, of which more than 4,500 will be built over its long life.

The future belongs to the drones

But the longer-term outlook for the F-35 is uncertain. Its costly capabilities are intended to make it effective against the air defences of a sophisticated enemy, such as China. But the growing vulnerability of American aircraft carriers to Chinese missiles will mean operating from well beyond the F-35’s 600-mile (1,000km) range.

Some military strategists already think that the job the F-35 is meant to do can be better handled by cruise missiles and remotely piloted drones. In many roles, unmanned planes are more efficient: they carry neither a bulky pilot nor the kit that keeps him alive, which means they can both turn faster and be stealthier. And if they are shot down, no one dies. Even the F-35’s champions concede that it will probably be the last manned strike fighter aircraft the West will build.

http://www.economist.com/node/18958487/

(%)

[MarshalStealth]

Click on this link and review the interesting funding requirements chart.

[MarshalStealth]

Technology that thrive, are usually evolved into something marketable.

U.S. to mothball gear to build top F-22 fighter
By Jim Wolf | Reuters – 7 hrs ago
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Even as the last F-22 fighter jet rolls out of flag-draped doors at a Lockheed Martin Corp assembly plant on Tuesday, the Air Force has taken steps that leave open an option to restart the premier plane's production relatively cheaply.

The Air Force is preserving the hardware used to build the jet, not scrapping it, although it insists this is solely to sustain the fleet over its projected 30-plus years' "lifecycle."

The F-22 is "easily the most capable fighter aircraft ever built, period," said Richard Aboulafia, a combat plane expert at the Teal Group aerospace consultancy.

"You don't know what the economy and the strategic picture will look like in a decade," he said. "And if one gets better and the other gets worse, you could see a restart."

A lunchtime ceremony feting F-22 program employees will mark the emergence of the 187th and final production model from the Marietta, Georgia, plant, 14 years after the most advanced and most costly per-plane U.S. fighter began flight tests.

F-22 supporters maintain it was terminated prematurely.

The fleet, as conceived during the Cold War, was to have been 750. That dropped to 381, then 243, before former Defense Secretary Robert Gates capped it at 187 in a belt-tightening move over program backers' strong objections.

A total of more than 30,000 jigs, fixtures and other "tooling" used to build the plane are being logged into a database and tucked into containers, some custom built, for long-term storage at Sierra Army Depot, Herlong, California.

The hardware is valued at $2 billion to $3 billion, according to Lockheed, the Pentagon's No. 1 supplier by sales.

The Sierra depot's high desert climate, low humidity and mild temperatures, are optimal for systems that might be needed to build components to support the fleet, or perhaps one day resume production.

Arms production lines have shut in the past only to be brought back, including aircraft such as the submarine-hunting P-3, U-2 spy plane and B-1A bomber resurrected as the B-1B.

Lockheed is under Air Force contract also to preserve the shop-floor know-how used to manufacture the fighter. It is accomplishing this through a video library of "smart books," DVDs designed to capture such things as how to hold a tool for best results.

The two-pronged preservation effort puts Lockheed in a "great position" to resume production if asked to do so, said Jeff Babione, the company's F-22 program general manager.

But Lockheed, the Pentagon's No. 1 supplier, has not been given any reason to think that such a request will come, he added in a telephone interview on Friday.

Bringing back the F-22 line would take less than $200 million, "a fraction of the costs seen in previous line restarts of other weapons systems," Alison Orne, a Lockheed spokeswoman, said by email, citing preliminary analysis.

The Air Force said government-owned F-22 production is being stored "for the sole purpose of sustaining the F-22 fleet" over its lifetime.

"No F-22 parts, tooling or related items are being stored for the purpose of preserving the option of restarting F-22 production," Jennifer Cassidy, an Air Force spokeswoman, said in an email.

She said the Air Force had commissioned a RAND analysis to assess tooling preservation options at congressional direction. The study concluded that saving the hardware "may significantly ease the execution of future F-22 sustainment needs, and the storage of that tooling can be provided at relatively low cost."

CUTTING EDGE

The radar-evading F-22 "Raptor" entered service in 2005, designed to own the skies on the first day of a conflict because of its low observability, high maneuverability plus sensor advances that make it the top gun for air-to-air combat.

Its cutting-edge capabilities, including agility, engine thrust and flight controls, "cannot be matched by any known or projected fighter aircraft," according to a U.S. Air Force fact sheet on the plane, which has not yet been used in combat.

The F-22 represents the high end of a tactical fighter mix that advocates say is critical to defend worldwide U.S. interests over coming decades alongside the F-35, a less capable, less costly, Lockheed stealth fighter now in early production.

The Pentagon currently plans to buy more than 2,440 F-35s for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps at $382.5 billion through 2035, its costliest purchase ever.

The current "program acquisition unit" cost of the F-35A model for the Air Force is $111 million, including "mission systems" and sustainment.

By contrast, the last production lot of four F-22s cost $153 million each, according to Lockheed, not including amortized research, development and maintenance that experts say would add more than $200 million apiece.

RESTART BUTTON?

Advocates of a larger F-22 fleet have cited emerging Russian and Chinese stealth fighters as well as the spread of sophisticated surface-to-air missiles that can home in all but the hardest-to-detect fighters.

The F-22 was barred from export sales to protect its high-tech secrets.

Michael Wynne, who was forced out as Air Force secretary in 2008 after disagreeing with Gates over the production cap, said by email that Japan and Australia would "immediately partner" to restart the line if Congress lifted the F-22 export ban.

(Reporting by Jim Wolf; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

http://news.yahoo.com/u-mothball-gea...031856051.html

#
Japan "likely to pick F-35 fighter" this week

By Tim Kelly and Kiyoshi Takenaka | Reuters – 3 hrs ago
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan will likely pick Lockheed Martin's F-35 jet as its next frontline fighter, media reported on Tuesday, which may help end six decades of isolation for the country's defense contractors and bolster its military against growing Chinese might.

The government will choose between two U.S. models -- the F-35 and the Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet -- and Europe's four-nation Eurofighter Typhoon, at a meeting of the national security council on Friday, the Nikkei business daily said.

The date of the planned meeting could not be confirmed with government officials and chief cabinet spokesman Osamu Fujimura said no decision had been made. The Pentagon's F-35 program office also said it had not received any word from Japan.

Analysts say the purchase is potentially worth $8 billion.

The hope for Lockheed is that assembling the F-35 in Japan will spur the pacifist nation to lift a ban on military equipment exports, allowing contractors such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to compete as suppliers for the fighter.

"If the government chooses to go forward and relax the (export ban) we believe there is a very strong case for participating in the F-35 program," said Dave Scott director of international business development for the F-35.

While the most expensive of the three, the F-35 leads the others due to its "overwhelmingly superior performance" and stealth capabilities, the Nikkei said.

To compete against Lockheed's fifth-generation technological edge, Boeing is offering as much as 80 percent of the construction to local makers, with Eurofighter promising 95 percent for their fourth-generation designs.

THE LURE OF JAPAN TECH

While each maker disagrees on the merits of their competing bids, all agree that Japan has technology they could use. And for U.S. military planners juggling with smaller budgets, widening out into a more competitive supply chain may let it arm itself more cheaply.

Although Japan is the world's sixth-biggest military spender, it often pays more than double other nations for the same equipment because local export-restricted manufacturers can only fill small orders at a high cost.

Removing the ban would stretch its defense purse further as military spending in neighboring China expands.

This year, Asia's biggest economy raised military outlays by 12.7 percent. That included money for its own stealth fighter, the J-20, which made its maiden flight in January.

Fielding the F-35 would put Japan a step ahead of China.

"The decision should be in line with what China has anticipated and come with little surprise," said Narushige Michishita, Associate Professor of Security and International Studies at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.

But any easing of a weapons export ban may prompt criticism from Beijing and be seen as step away from Japan's pacifist constitution.

Although Boeing and Eurofighter may leave Japan empty handed, the battle for sales rages elsewhere.

The radar-evading F-35 is often touted as the second-best choice in the U.S. arsenal after the F-22, but marketers pitch the F-18 and Eurofighter as strong alternatives.

The market for fighter jets in the Middle East and Asia is particularly active as air forces worldwide come up against replacement cycles and prepare for growing fears of insecurity.

India is expected to choose between the Eurofighter and Dassault Aviation Rafale, on a potential $11 billion order for 126 fighter jets in coming weeks.

Those two aircraft are also bidding for an order in the United Arab Emirates. The U.S. said on Monday it would sell 18 more Lockheed Martin F-16 fighters to Iraq.

(Additional reporting by Balaji Sridharan Tim Hepher, Jim Wolf, Andrea Shalal-Esa; Editing by Nick Macfie)

http://news.yahoo.com/japan-likely-p...075453102.html

[MarshalStealth]

This news item is an interesting oldie but goodie.

EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Fla.—The best fighter pilots from the Air Force, Marines and Navy arrived in the Florida Panhandle last year to learn to fly the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most expensive, most advanced weapons program in U.S. history. They are still waiting.

Concerns about the stealth jets' safety, cost overruns and questions about the entire program's feasibility have delayed the training and left about 35 pilots mostly outside the cockpit. The most the pilots do with the nine F-35s at Eglin Air Force Base is occasionally taxi them and fire up the engines. Otherwise their training is limited to three F-35 flight simulators, classroom work and flights in older-model jets. Only a handful of test pilots get to fly the F-35s.

"The most-frustrated pilot is one who isn't flying at all," said Marine Col. Arthur Tomassetti, vice commander of the fighter wing and a former test pilot for the F-35 prototype.

Built by Lockheed Martin under a 2001 contract, the F-35 is supposed to replace Cold War-era aircraft such as the Air Force's F-16 fighter and the Navy's and Marines' F/A-18 Hornet. It would also be sold to many NATO countries and other U.S. allies.

Costing between $65 million and $100 million each, depending on the version, the F-35 is described as a generational leap from older fighter jets. A single-seat aircraft, it can fly at about 1,050 mph and, officials say, fight both air-to-air and air-to-ground significantly better than its predecessors.

One version can land on an aircraft carrier while another can hover, landing on and taking off from a helicopter carrier. It carries more fuel and more ordnance internally than older fighter jets, allowing it to maintain stealth, and has the latest onboard computer systems, allowing the pilot to control the plane and communicate with other aircraft and interact with ground commanders like never before.

"From a flying perspective, what we call the stick and rudder is the same for any platform, but when you integrate the sensors, the pilot has the capability to make much better decisions and be much more precise," said Air Force Col Andrew Toth, the training wing's commander. His name adorns one of the school's F-35s.

And because it is to be used by all three branches of the U.S. military that fly fighter jets and by U.S. allies, training and maintenance could be handled jointly. That's intended to save money compared to having separate, parallel maintenance and training groups in each force.

But just as the program appeared to be taking off, it was grounded over a variety of concerns. They range from improperly installed parachutes under the pilots' ejector seats, to worries at the Pentagon that there has not been enough testing of the jets, to ongoing concerns by some in Congress that the entire F-35 program is too expensive. Its projected cost has jumped from $233 billion to an estimated $385 billion, including development. Forty-three F-35s have been built and another 2,443 have been ordered by the Pentagon.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz said earlier this month that the Air Force wasn't ready to start student flights at Eglin.

"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," he 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."

Questions about funding, slow production of the aircraft and uncertainty about overall strategy have contributed to inefficiencies in money and manpower, said Baker Spring, a defense analyst with the Washington-based Heritage Foundation.

Spring said the complicated way the Pentagon budgeting process worked has trickled down to the pilots at the school.

"You have people out there twiddling their thumbs waiting for planes. This contributes to the high unit costs," Spring said.

All of this has left the first batch of would-be F-35 pilots in training limbo. This is supposed to be the first time fighter pilots from all three branches train together and they are looking forward to both the competition and learning from each other.

"All of the pilots here are incredibly talented, hand-picked, board-selected, they are the best of the best and the opportunity to come here is and fly the F-35 as a Marine operator is truly the career opportunity of a lifetime," said Marine Lt. Col. Jim Wellons said at ceremony for the jet at Eglin last year.

"There is so much that we can learn from each other. We in the Marine Corps are focused on supporting the Marine on the ground, even though we have an airplane that can perform air combat and the full range of tactical missions. The Air Force fighter community also supports the man on the ground but they have a significant strategic focus. The Navy is very focused on shipboard operations, so we all have our different strengths and probably weaknesses."

When the school becomes fully operational, dozens of pilots and hundreds of F-35 crew members will funnel through Eglin each year.

"Right now it looks like a large building out here with empty hallways, but we are going to have 900 students soon," said the Marine's Col. Tomassetti during a tour of the largely empty school last year.

Tomassetti said this month that the school continues to wait for a "ready to train" order from the Pentagon. The colonel said he and the Marines he commands are eager to fly new jet.

"We do have F-16s on loan and some of our pilots are going off station to fly other jets. They are flying and they understand that this is part of standing up a new program," he said.

When the Pentagon decides to allow the Eglin planes to fly is anyone's guess, said J.R. McDonald, Lockheed's Eglin-based vice president of corporate domestic business development.

"I think we are close but it is a U.S. government decision and the government enterprise will decide when it decides. The (fighter wing) just has to patient because they have done everything they can do," he said.

"I've stopped making predictions."
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2012/02/27/new_fighter_jet_training_stalls_grounding_pilots/

[LaiSteve66]

We're still morons for buying this crap.

[MarshalStealth]

Originally Posted by LaiSteve66

We're still morons for buying this crap.

We live in interesting times. ...

[LaiSteve66]

Originally Posted by MarshalStealth

We live in interesting times. ...

We live in very, very sad times.

[MarshalStealth]

Originally Posted by LaiSteve66

We live in very, very sad times.

It could be worse. ...

[MarshalStealth]

Whenever technology evolves, extremity sometimes becomes a part of package. Quality and safety usually come later.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504803_1...y-they-did-it/

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504803_1...oversy-begins/

The new users of any new technology should be called test pilots.