Considering everything and including Boeings recent spin, I am sure their fix already in the works will be good enough. The jet has to go through a depot process anyway, tasks at the depot will be considered when refirbing the aircraft re: the new fix announced. It isn’t as embarrassing as the time when the first batch of production jets needed a barrel replacement after only 500 hours in service. Nothing like testing on the cheap and no REAL prototype process for what was sold to congress as an “upgrade” but was way different enough to justify being a new design compared to the legacy Hornet.

I don’t get it either. Program QC? Pencil whipping test reviews? I don’t know, I am sure there is a huge investigation going on right now. It would be great if there is a save for this somehow. I mean for USAF that is a lot of cash plugged into the inventory we have. DOD doesn’t seem to have any fear of canceling things though. This could end up a real happy story in the end or a real ugly one. The goal will be to see if a scripted range event can end up being the same as real ops where munitions pukes pull it out of storage, hang it on the aircraft and presto, it flies, hits and explodes. Good grief, I wouldn’t want to be in that program right now. Every element that makes up that program will get investigated by a CYA team that will make sure they, themselves, are squeaky clean.

I was just thinking…. The powered variant * of JSOW is in testing now. Unpowered JSOW has a track record of working. ( even though there was that one famous OSW mission where a flight of them completely missed the target due to some reason. 😮 ….. Anyway I do wonder, sometime in the future, if the powered JSOW could pick up some of the slack if the JASSM program takes an even worse turn?

*=

“We plan to offer the warfighter a 300 nautical mile
(approximately 345 statute miles) weapon with a price goal of $350,000, far
less expensive than similar capability weapons currently in the
warfighter’s inventory.”

JDAMs aren’t going to do you much good against a site defended by S-300 & above. JASSM will. They need to hold LM’s feet to the fire and make them address the issue on THEIR dime.

So far, JASSM is no more than a theory that is sucking down cash we don’t have. So far it’s ability to do anything in a stiff IADS is zero. If the program is as faulty as it is, I doubt it has any significant “stealth” ability” worth mentioning. These are some of the same people that said it was good to go for production and raped us for over 300 units delivered to the Air Force. Time to cut off the gravy train and have the weapon requirement go up for a competitive performance bid,…. where performance is measured in reliability and bring some euro cruise missiles into the mix. If they fly better and hit the target and go “bang” when they are supposed to, then give the taxpayers money to them. Faulty projects like this in this current budget environment need to be tied to a tree and clubbed to death.

Of course this was a different kind of test, where operational units pulled the weapons out of their magazines on order and put together a mission plan and shot the things.

Not to be confused with the industry side of the house combined with AFMC certifying the thing for production not too far back. 😉 The test above was USAF doing an excellent job of CYA after having over 300 of the things delivered and some kind of adverse discovery of the program popping up after digging into the issues over the long range variant in R&D.

If the original tests were that full of holes to let a product like this slip through, one also has to question the claims of low cost and value of the weapon hawked by industry. Starting out at $700,000 dollars U.S. each with production goals to get unit cost down into the 400k’s and 300k’s depending on what flavor of money you like to use.

Be pretty bad if we took a bunch of these to war and most of them went into the dirt with no effect. Each one of these will buy a lot of JDAMs.

They appeared on an Air Force Base, genius 😀

Guess who’s going to see Sabbath and Megadeth on the 19th…although the Sabs are using the touring name Heaven & Hell, since they’re on tour with Ronnie James Dio on vocals playing nothing but Dio Sabbath tunes, including some brand new material :diablo:

In another serious down turn for heavy metal. The export name for the SNIPER- Pod…. “Pantera” …. Has been removed. From now on, SNIPER Pods export or otherwise will be called SNIPER. :diablo:

Well… if anything this might help slow down the silly unjustified defence draw downs…. for ….oh a month or so until it goes out of the short attention span cycle of politicos. :diablo: