aTmAg said:
Do you guys think that the military didn't know about this lighting "limitation"? They sign off on a million exit criteria before the plane even goes into production. They don't care about things like this. Why? Because, like airliners, they aren't going to fly $100M aircraft through a thunderstorm when they can so easily avoid it. That would be stupid for zero gain. It's not like LM flew ever closer to lightning storms until they came up with the right number in flight test. If they did that it would be something like 24.483 not a round 25. In fact, it's clear to me that the 25 number was decided beforehand. That the government required LM to support flying up to within 25 miles of a thunderstorm and LM didn't even bother testing anything closer. Because nobody cares about anything closer than that.
They absolutely knew. However, if the JPO JSF was under so much pressure (which thy definitely were) to field the aircraft and declare initial operational capability (IOC) they would bend the exit criteria and allow a "fair weather" JSF to be fielded initially. That deferral would be an occasion for celebration at Lockheed Martin because any time you can get the solution to a hard problem deferred from Block 1 to Block 2 deliveries, that's more profit in a cost-plus contract.
Industry never gives the government (taxpayer) a feature for free. If it is not explicitly included in the acquisition program baseline as a key performance parameter, key system attribute, or additional system attribute then it's not going to be in the spec for the deliverable.
The "lightning problem" can be transformed from a failure to deliver a basic functional product to a future enhanced variant of the aircraft for which the vendor takes credit in advertising for solving. Behold, the next marketing campaign for the JSF is the "All Weather JSF" when they get the lightning problem solved to some level of satisfaction for DOT&E. Fixing deferred problems that were removed from the baseline and then advertising it as an enhanced platform is what happened with both the Harrier "B" and the Phantom "II".
[As an aside, the DoD had a really good guy, Shay Assad, in a senior position to fight industry on this type of bull**** but he was eventually removed and reassigned to a position where he could not get between industry and the ASD AT&L budgets.
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/04/defense-pentagon-spending-assad-221776The Big 5 hated Shay because he was a traitor to his class (retired VP at Raytheon) and knew all the tricks. Industry spend untold millions lobbying behind the scenes to get him removed from his position at the Pentagon as Director for Pricing. Shay was saving the government billions of dollars through his stubborn negotiating tactics and exposing waste.
https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2018/12/shay-assad/153591/Industry "got him" by pointing out that he insisted on living in Boston and his travel to D.C. was being paid by DoD. The ~$500k for travel back and forth between Boston and DC over the course of seven years was a public "gotcha" for ASD AT&L Ellen Lord (Trump's SecDef) so she transferred Assad to DCMA where he was not in a position to hold industry's feet to the fire on contract negotiations but only to monitor compliance after contracts were awarded. I believe he just retired shortly after being reassigned because he really didn't need the money. This is how the game is played.]
