Going from memory, with regards to the Australian complaints:

Apparently there are issues with the cabin seats (too weak?)
You cant have a door gunner! (well ok yes you can, but then you cant have people entering and exiting the aircraft at the same time, unlike the Blackhawk which has a dedicated door gunners position).
Inflight engine failure last year which grounded the fleet.

The Tiger I believe was limited to daytime flying due to navigational issues (?)
though am unsure if its been resolved.

All other issues with delays in delivery/ training etc are out of the scope of things I believe.

What does surprise me is the fact people are still waving the F35 flag when a report comes out saying the F35 cant land on a carrier because the tail hook is too close to the main gear and everyone here just whinges on and on about the F18 being a waste of money?!?!?

One would assume that if a carrier aircraft cant land on a carrier and a major redesign is needed thereby increasing costs, that the SMART thing to do is to look at alternatives instead of wasting BILLIONS on a project which is appearing not to be “as good as once thought”.

For years the RAAF has been bleating “Do more with less”…

The problem in defence (like most public servants and their departments) is the wastage. Too many times a lot of billion dollar projects run over budget, over time and dont work.

Governments can go “ooh look we cut the budget” and the average clueless voter will either scream about it or think its a vote grabber.

Sadly in reality wastage will just keep occuring and then the government wonders why the dept (defence or otherwise) cant function properly.

When was the last time in the USA/UK/Australia has ANYONE ever heard of people being sacked? charged with fraud? demoted? because of mismanagement?

I would say rarely? never?

Defence is a sacred cash cow and always will be…. because its been allowed to develop into a BUSINESS. Look at how much of defence is “outsourced” these days.

Today I learnt that some Mirage III variants were fitted with fixed canards.

I’m no aerodynamicist but I’m surprised that this sort of thing – fitting an existing airframe design with canards – actually works. Obviously the poster-child for this canards-as-optional-extra thing is the Su-30, but as I recall there was also an F-15 technology demonstrator with canards. Have there been any other instances of the practice, successful or otherwise?

The F-15s canards were not fixed…. Rafale, Gripen, Typhoon and the SU30 series all use moveable cannards.

The F-16 AFTI demonstrator also had moveable canards (of sorts) under the air intake.

Plenty of the Mirage Deltas as far back the 1980s were retro fitted with fixed canards. The Mirage 4000 also came equipped with them, but never went ahead to production.

http://money.msn.com/top-stocks/post.aspx?post=4ed50943-e070-4824-a075-b79aef24b8ed

Slowing F-35 deliveries could trim Lockheed valuation
With the fighter jet eventually expected to account for 20% of revenue, any further production delays will push up the company’s aeronautics backlog and reduce earnings
By Trefis on Thu, Dec 15, 2011 2:46 PM

Highlighting the structural glitches which have plagued the program, Venlet told AOL Defense that tempering production rates may now be necessary. His remarks draw into question Lockheed’s “concurrency strategy,” which seeks to maximize unit production before test flights are completed with a view to retrofitting any necessary repairs. If production rates now drop, the change in backlog could have a modest impact on our stock price valuation. Lockheed competes with companies such as Boeing (BA +3.25%).

See our full analysis for Lockheed Martin here

Concurrency rushes through economies of scale

Lockheed is the Pentagon’s No. 1 contractor by sales, with the Department of Defense planning to purchase more than 2,440 F-35s at a cost of $382.5 billion. In order to unleash economies of scale as quickly as possible, Lockheed’s strategy has been to ramp production early on in the program and incorporate design changes as needed during testing.

Venlet now describes this approach as a fundamental miscalculation, arguing that the cost burden of retrospectively fixing multiple design flaws on individual units is excessive. He says that while most of the glitches are minor and none of them relate to safety or performance issues, repairs are nonetheless costlier to implement post-assembly. The Pentagon has acted on such concerns twice before, most recently by scaling back its upcoming F-35 production batch from 42 to 30 aircraft.

Slowdown hits backlog

With the F-35 eventually expected to account for 20% of Lockheed’s revenue, any further production delays will push up the company’s aeronautics backlog and in turn reduce its earnings. Drag the trend-line below to see how a backlog of $1.43 billion by 2018 compared with our current forecast of zero has the effect of trimming about 3% off our Trefis price estimate of $98.

Lockheed US Aeronautics Change in Backlog

While a rising backlog is bad news for investors, any negativity should be placed in the context of the Pentagon’s ongoing support for Lockheed. This year the company’s aeronautics share of total DOD, NASA and Homeland Security Contracts will reach 2.86%, and its commitment to the F-35 program should see that continue, rising to 3.46% by 2014. Furthermore, 750 units of the F-35 will be sold to 11 partner countries, giving a welcome boost to Lockheed’s international aeronautics division.

So we have a number of issues which need fixing but we will just keep building them… and then recall the aircraft to fix them at a later date!
What a marvelous idea!!

The push to destroy Qantas was revealed a few months ago:

This confirms what others have been saying for a while about how Qantas is subsidising Jetstar to its own detriment and to circumvent the Qantas Sale Act.
For those who haven’t seen it, Senator Xenophon’s speech of 23rd Aug is reproduced below.

Senator XENOPHON (South Australia) (19:37): I rise to speak tonight on an issue that is close to the hearts of many Australians, and that is the future of our national carrier, Qantas. At 90, Qantas is the world’s oldest continuously running airline. It is an iconic Australian company. Its story is woven into the story of Australia and Australians have long taken pride in the service and safety standards provided by our national carrier. Who didn’t feel a little proud when Dustin Hoffman uttered the immortal line in Rain Man, ‘Qantas never crashed’?

While it is true that Qantas never crashes, the sad reality is that Qantas is being deliberately trashed by management in the pursuit of short-term profits and at the expense of its workers and passengers. For a long time, Qantas management has been pushing the line that Qantas international is losing money and that Jetstar is profitable. Tonight, it is imperative to expose those claims for the misinformation they are. The reality is that Qantas has long been used to subsidise Jetstar in order to make Jetstar look profitable and Qantas look like a burden. In a moment, I will provide detailed allegations of cost-shifting that I have sourced from within the Qantas Group, and when you know the facts you quickly see a pattern. When there is a cost to be paid, Qantas pays it, and when there is a profit to be made, Jetstar makes it.

But first we need to ask ourselves: why? Why would management want Qantas to look unprofitable? Why would they want to hide the cost of a competing brand within their group, namely Jetstar, in amongst the costs faced by Qantas?

To understand that, you need to go back to the days when Qantas was being privatised. When Qantas was privatised the Qantas Sale Act 1992 imposed a number of conditions, which in turn created a number of problems for any management group that wanted to flog off parts of the business. Basically, Qantas has to maintain its principal place of operations here in Australia, but that does not stop management selling any subsidiaries, which brings us to Jetstar.

Qantas has systematically built up the low-cost carrier at the expense of the parent company. I have been provided with a significant number of examples where costs which should have been billed back to Jetstar have in fact been paid for by Qantas. These are practices that I believe Qantas and Jetstar management need to explain. For example, when Jetstar took over the Cairns-Darwin-Singapore route, replacing Qantas flights, a deal was struck that required Qantas to provide Jetstar with $6 million a year in revenue. Why? Why would one part of the business give up a profitable route like that and then be asked to pay for the privilege? Then there are other subsidies when it comes to freight. On every sector Jetstar operates an A330, Qantas pays $6,200 to $6,400 for freight space regardless of actual uplift. When you do the calculations, this turns out to be a small fortune. Based on 82 departures a week, that is nearly half-a-million dollars a week or $25∏ million a year.

Then there are the arrangements within the airport gates. In Melbourne, for example, my information from inside the Qantas group is that Jetstar does not pay for any gates, but instead Qantas domestic is charged for the gates. My question for Qantas management is simple: are these arrangements replicated right around Australia and why is Qantas paying Jetstar’s bills? Why does Qantas lease five check-in counters at Sydney Terminal 2, only to let Jetstar use one for free? It has been reported to me that there are other areas where Jetstar’s costs magically become Qantas’s costs. For example, Jetstar does not have a treasury department and has only one person in government affairs. I am told Qantas’s legal department also does free work for Jetstar.

Then there is the area of disruption handling where flights are cancelled and people need to be rebooked. Here, insiders tell me, Qantas handles all rebookings and the traffic is all one way. It is extremely rare for a Qantas passenger to be rebooked on a Jetstar flight, but Jetstar passengers are regularly rebooked onto Qantas flights. I am informed that Jetstar never pays Qantas for the cost of those rebooked passengers and yet Jetstar gets to keep the revenue from the original bookings. This, I am told, is worth millions of dollars every year. So Jetstar gets the profit while Qantas bears the costs of carriage. It has also been reported to me that when Qantas provides an aircraft to Jetstar to cover an unserviceable plane, Jetstar does not pay for the use of this plane.

Yet another example relates to the Qantas Club. Jetstar passengers can and do use the Qantas Club but Jetstar does not pay for the cost of any of this. So is Qantas really losing money? Or is it profitable but simply losing money on paper because it is carrying so many costs incurred by Jetstar? We have been told by Qantas management that the changes that will effectively gut Qantas are necessary because Qantas international is losing money but, given the inside information I have just detailed, I would argue those claims need to be reassessed.

Indeed, given these extensive allegations of hidden costs, it would be foolish to take management’s word that Qantas international is losing money. So why would Qantas want to make it look like Qantas international is losing money? Remember the failed 2007 private equity bid by the Allco Finance Group. It was rejected by shareholders, and thank goodness it was, for I am told that what we are seeing now is effectively a strategy of private equity sell-off by stealth.

Here is how it works. You have to keep Qantas flying to avoid breaching the Qantas Sale Act but that does not stop you from moving assets out of Qantas and putting them into an airline that you own but that is not controlled by the Qantas Sale Act. Then you work the figures to make it appear as though the international arm of Qantas is losing money. You use this to justify the slashing of jobs, maintenance standards and employment of foreign crews and, ultimately, the creation of an entirely new airlines to be based in Asia and which will not be called Qantas. The end result? Technically Qantas would still exist but it would end up a shell of its former self and the Qantas Group would end up with all these subsidiaries it can base overseas using poorly paid foreign crews with engineering and safety standards that do not match Australian standards. In time, if the Qantas Group wants to make a buck, they can flog these subsidiaries off for a tidy profit. Qantas management could pay the National Boys Choir and the Australian Girls’ Choir to run to the desert and sing about still calling Australia home, but people would not buy it. It is not just about feeling good about our national carrier—in times of trouble our national carrier plays a key strategic role. In an international emergency, in a time of war, a national carrier is required to freight resources and people around the country and around the world. Qantas also operates Qantas Defence Services, which conducts work for the RAAF. If Qantas is allowed to wither, who will meet these strategic needs?

I pay tribute to the 35,000 employees of the Qantas Group. At the forefront of the fight against the strategy of Qantas management have been the Qantas pilots, to whom millions of Australians have literally entrusted their lives. The Australian and International Pilots Association sees Qantas management strategy as a race to the bottom when it comes to service and safety. On 8 November last year, QF32 experienced a serious malfunction with the explosion of an engine on an A380 aircraft. In the wrong hands, that plane could have crashed. But it did not, in large part because the Qantas flight crew had been trained to exemplary world-class standards and knew how to cope with such a terrifying reality. I am deeply concerned that what is being pursued may well cause training levels to fall and that as a result safety standards in the Qantas Group may fall as well. AIPA pilots and the licensed aircraft engineers are not fighting for themselves; they are fighting for the Australian public. That is why I am deeply concerned about any action Qantas management may be considering taking against pilots who speak out in the public interest.

A lot of claims have been made about the financial state of Qantas international but given the information I have presented tonight, which has come from within the Qantas Group, I believe these claims by management are crying out for further serious forensic investigation. Qantas should not be allowed to face death by a thousand cuts—job cuts, route cuts, quality cuts, engineering cuts, wage cuts. None of this is acceptable and it must all be resisted for the sake of the pilots, the crews, the passengers and ultimately the future of our national carrier.