The F-35 is STILL a boondoggle

More often than planned?!

[A]ll three versions of the fighter are breaking down “more often than planned.”

  Bloomberg

Three versions - all crap!

“In short, for all variants, aircraft are breaking down more often than planned and taking longer to fix.”

And taking longer to fix.

None of the Air Force, Marines and Navy variants of the Lockheed Martin Corp. fighter are meeting their five key “reliability or maintainability metrics,” Robert Behler, the Pentagon’s director of operational testing, said in prepared remarks Wednesday before two House Armed Services Committee panels.

The House subcommittees are reviewing the $428 billion program’s status and progress recovering from years of cost overruns and production delays.

[...]

His statement is a reality check just weeks after the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin announced that they finalized the largest contract in the program’s history, a deal valued at $34 billion for 478 additional aircraft. About $27 billion of F-35s have already been placed on contract even though the program hasn’t completed all its combat testing and struggles with reliability.

The very definition of insanity.

So far, 458 jets have been fielded out of about 3,500 planned purchases by U.S. and allies from Australia to Poland.

Well at least other countries are getting stiffed, too. How many years have we been flogging this dead horse? Are we counting the time by decades yet?

Too much money in it to scrap it now, I guess.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.