With all due respect, I think You didn’t catch something important here:
-1st: This is a gov monitoring program that trace its roots at a political level. They have merely always been dephased in time and number of occurrence. This is normal. They are not going to employ the same nbr of technicians and engineer as LM does! As I have said on an other forum, the way you observe affect what you see. Here they have been focusing too much on the details (due to the original needs and intentions), parting things that were not meant to be or had a degree of synergy (see Eisenberg principle).

-2nd: They are not fixing the prototypes/Pres-series/Intermediate bloks. Hence they are not tracking data of those. They are focused on the series. The one that would end to be built in large number. And this, as always during such a process, is a floating standards. Some form of it are in the prototypes, some flying in the initial blocks and some on the production line… This is what they are after.

I still don’t understand. According to the report, as Obligatory says: “Failures of the older component were not being counted in the metrics at all anymore, but flight hours from all 100 aircraft were counted.”

Why are the flight hours from the aircraft using the “unfixed” components being used to calculate the performance of the “fixed” component? How could any stats indicating performance of the “fixed” component be valid? Stats are calculated to inform. It looks like these stats are designed to misinform. Pointless exercise IMO.

Something else:

The OT&E report also found other uses of questionable metrics to boost F-35 reliability, notably in how improper scoring resulted in “higher than expected [Mean Times To Repair] values.

“Discrepancies for which maintainers have to attempt multiple solutions before finding a true fix are being re-scored as a single event, while in the past they were documented as multiple repair attempts, each with its own MTTR.

“The individual MTTRs for these attempted repairs are now rolled up into the single, re-scored event,” thereby artificially reducing the number of reported failures although there has been no reduction in the number of failures.

What is that all about?

I notice that the changes referred to in the article all improve the reported performance of F-35 at a stroke. Funny that none of them impair the reported performance of the F-35, isn’t it?

OT&E employs a Joint Reliability Maintainability Evaluation Team. Being “joint” means it is composed of military operational maintainers, military acquisition engineering and contractor engineering. The JRMET is chartered with examining the circumstances of each failure when it occurs to determine “chargeable/non-chargeable”. Chargeable failures require a root cause analysis and corrective action. The JRMET assigns a “fix effectiveness” to each corrective action. Once a fix is determined to be effective, even if not yet fielded, the counting of additional failures caused by the “fixed” failure mode is halted. Its engineering not slight-of-hand and has been used on various aircraft OT&E programs for decades.

The JRMET, and more, is outlined in AFOTECPAM 99-104, which can be found by Google search.

I think I get the gist of the methodolgy used: basically when a component fix is deemed effective, failures for the preceding unfixed component are no longer logged. According to the report, though, as Obligatory cites: “Failures of the older component were not being counted in the metrics at all anymore, but flight hours from all 100 aircraft were counted.”

I am not a statistician but I am an analyst programmer by profession and sometimes need to produce statistics. If I had come up with an analytical method whereby part of one set of data was discounted (pre-fixed component failures in this instance) but the related data (time element associated with that discounted data set) continued to be used in calculating the failure rate per hour of another data set (fixed component failures in this instance), I would have been sacked on the spot by any responsible principal. Of course, if it were a case of middle management employing me on the basis of engineering ridiculous and misleading stats for presentation to senior management, my middle management principals would have been more than happy for me to prepare such nonsense but you know what? I would have told them where they could go. I would rather use whatever talents I may have in a less asinine manner. Polished nonsense remains nonsense. Period. There is far too much of it where the F-35 is concerned.

USN to slow down F-35C deliveries?

The U.S. Navy has reduced its planned buys of the Lockheed Martin F-35C Joint Strike Fighter by almost one-third over the fiscal 2016-2020 Future Years Defense Program (FYDP), while committing almost $800 million to new standoff weapon developments and canceling the only missile program that was primarily dedicated to the F-35C. All the new developments are part of the fiscal 2016 presidential budget proposal and constitute the first move by a U.S. service to slow down its JSF procurements.

http://aviationweek.com/defense/f-35cs-cut-back-us-navy-invests-standoff-weapons

Would this affect price cuts for F-35’s in general, pushing them still further to the right?

Playing silly games with F-35 reliabilty indicators. Stupid thing to do: massaging data to distort stats merely erodes your credibility and the last thing this program needs is for things to be done that further erode its credibility.

http://www.defense-aerospace.com/articles-view/feature/5/160338/f_35-program-massages-flight-test-results-%282%29.html

You dont seem to get the point. Hitherto, these legal agreements were not there to the desired level. The so called TOT deals were not exact enough on ensuring vendor compliance & depended too much on political contacts to see things through.

either (a) get the best lawyers to draft your purchase contract

You dont seem to get the point. Hitherto, these legal agreements were not there to the desired level. The so called TOT deals were not exact enough on ensuring vendor compliance & depended too much on political contacts to see things through.

or (b) deal with a supplier that is not so mercenary, one with a spirit to get things done successfully even if that involves a bit of give and a bit less take.

I imagine that dealing with suppliers of military hardware must be something of a nightmare per se. Suppliers do not appear to be the sort of companies that see the buyer as a partner whose welfare is to be considered in a buyer/seller partnership.

Dassault cant be legally held liable for anything HAL does. What HAL is asking for is a clear commitment from Dassault that it hold up its end of the bargain in terms of deliveries of documentation, spares, jigs/fixtures etc for the program.

That’s a bit like asking Dassault if they really mean to adhere to a contract they are signing. For crying out loud, it’s a legal agreement. Both parties are bound by the terms and conditions of a contract when they sign on the dotted line. The question you should ask yourself if you don’t think the other party is going to adhere to the contract is this: should I be making a contract with this other party?