Jet Fighter Influence
This story originally appeared on June 4, 2013. Sometime in the spring of 2012, Al Bunting received a message imploring him to publicly endorse America’s warplane of the future. Bunting, a retired senior Air Force officer and administrator for the tiny New Jersey coastal town of Sea Girt, was... Read more
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Is Still a Huge Mess
The U.S. Director of Operational Test and Evaluation — DOT&E — recently released a scathing assessment of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program as part of his annual report. Buried inside 48 pages of highly technical language is a gripping story of mismanagement, delayed tests, serious safety issues, a... Read more
F-16s Could Fly for 92 Years
Lockheed Martin, which manufactures the iconic F-16 jet fighter, just completed a two-year test that simulated a staggering 92 years of normal flying for one of the single-engine planes. That’s a long time. And amazingly, the F-16 — a 1990s-vintage Block 50 version — held up just fine. “The... Read more
U.S. Air Force Requires Airmen to Praise Troubled Stealth Fighter
In an eight-page document marked “not for public release,” the U.S. Air Force commands its airmen to say positive things about Lockheed Martin’s problem-prone F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. “Articulate the capabilities of the aircraft and explain it is a capability warfighters must have (explain why we need the F-35),”... Read more
We Have Proof the U.S. Air Force Watered Down the F-35 to Avoid Embarrassment
On May 18, 2012, the U.S. House of Representatives dropped a figurative bomb on the U.S. Air Force. Fed up with delays and cost overruns on the U.S.-led international F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program — an ambitious effort to replace nearly all the thousands of jet fighters in the... Read more
There’s a Lot Riding on America’s Next Stealth Bomber
The U.S. Air Force is expected to award a contract for its secretive Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B) program later this month. The LRS-B award could determine the fate of the U.S. defense-aerospace industry as Northrop Grumman and a combined Boeing/Lockheed Martin team vie to secure a program that could... Read more
Lockheed Martin Took Taxpayer Dollars, Spent Them Lobbying for More Dollars
Lockheed Martin Corporation will pay $4.7 million to settle charges that it illegally used taxpayer dollars to lobby the government for a no bid contract extension at one of the nation’s nuclear weapons labs, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. From 2009 to 2012, Sandia Corporation, a wholly... Read more
Lockheed Has Plans For a Mach-6 Spy Plane
It looks like Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, the famed workshop that designed cutting-edge Cold War airplanes including the F-104, the U-2, the SR-71 and the F-117, has revealed to Aviation Week & Space Technology’s Guy Norris the existence of a project for a hypersonic strike aircraft— the SR-72. After... Read more
F’d: How the U.S. and Its Allies Got Stuck with the World’s Worst New Warplane
From all the recent sounds of celebrating coming out of Washington, D.C., you might think the Pentagon’s biggest, priciest and most controversial warplane development had accelerated right past all its problems. The price tag—currently an estimated $1 trillion to design, build and operate 2,400 copies—is steadily going down. Production... Read more