Skunk Works Mailing List
From: betnal@ns.net
Subject: Re: THAAD
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 99 18:17:24 GMT
On 6/18/99 3:53AM, in message
<199906181054.DAA29295@toucan.prod.itd.earthlink.net>, "James P. Stevenson"
<jamesstevenson@sprintmail.com> wrote:
> >
> The problem comes, Art, when we, as taxpayers, pay for these weapons to
> go into production before the testing has proven their viability.
>
> Jim
>
>
>
I agree totally. In the cases cited above, production contracts were not
signed or were conditional until testing was far enough along to be sure the
things would work.
Nowadays, with the incredibly drawn-out no-risk testing we do no company can
afford to keep the option alive until its complete, so they say either pay the
total cost of the testing during the testing phase or give us a production
contract where we can recoup these costs. Further, because of the glacial
progress of testing (are you aware that in all these years we've only managed to
get two Comanches flying and the combined flight time of Both aircraft is less
than 300 hours?), support for a program may not last until testing is complete, or
it may become a target for someone trying to score political points. Finally,
because waiting until testing is far enough along pushes the IOC so far out
nowadays that it becomes ludicrous. So, all this convinces people to order things
into production before they should.
It's going to be 22 years from the time the ATF started for it to reach IOC.
Over 13 years from first flight! It doesn't have to be that way. Again, consider
the Tomcat: Contract award in Jan. '69. First flight, Dec. 1970. Navy workups
1973, IOC 1974 and first deployment (on Enterprise) in 1975. F-15 (which didn't
have benefit of F-111 experience) didn't take that much longer. This was normal
for those days and earlier. Why not now?
Art
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Created: Fri Jun 18 14:36:36 EDT 1999