Lockheed deserves to die and should have a long time ago. The company of Kelly Johnson is long gone. Lockheed is nothing but a political animal that has forgotten how to manage construction of airplanes. They are oily to boot.
Take the drawing and give them to someone who deserves the opportunity and can perform.
Never mind that the 35 is a shill of an airplane.
I don’t know if this is correct but I heard that Lockheed Martin has almost as many lawyers as engineers on their payroll. I worked on the Zumwalt Program for the Navy until I retired. Needless to say, I’m not impressed with them as a company.
Kelly Johnson and Glenn Martin are spinning in their graves.
Lockheed always had its problems. I’m old enough to remember the L-1011 airliner fiasco that nearly put the company into bankruptcy. Then there was the Luftwaffe bribery scandal where several old Nazi Generals took money to buy a tricked-up interceptor (the F-104) and convert it to a fighter-bomber. Bribery AND lethal (to it’s pilots) aircraft. Off to the side you had Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works that built hand-made aircraft for the CIA that did amazing cutting edge stuff. But the USAF wouldn’t touch their stuff until the F-117 Stealth Fighter.
Heck, go back to their P-38 fighter during WW2. I don’t think they ever got all the bugs out of that plane. It was the “F-35 of its Day”. They didn’t even solve some of the basic aerodynamic problems until the “L” model when the plane was basically surplus-to-needs after the cheaper and more effective P-51D largely replaced it in squadron service.
I happen to think that many of the problems that you keep reading about with the F-35 were solved years ago, but keep getting regurgitated by the so-called ‘experts’. However, there’s no denying that Lockheed operates more like a government arsenal rather than a normal commercial aviation company.
Actually Kelly Johnson was a big part of the problem. The guy established Lockheed as the best in technological excellence but he was a totally political player who really knew the backroom corruption game. Lockheed can do nothing cheaply and they are more than happy to inflate the cost using payoffs to the families of decision makers to grease the skids. Trump cut the cost of the F-35 by about 20 million per ship set and much of that came out pockets of grifting parasites in Washington and their cronies . That said, F-35 is an excellent aircraft that is really a 5th Gen airframe with near 6th Gen digital flight systems architecture that are generally open system and platform independent. Airframes are relatively easy but the systems are hard. The rapid development of the new 6 th Gen F-22 replacement got done so quickly in part because it leveraged aspects the F-35 investment. Democrats in Congress used the existence of F-35 to cancel the F-22 by falsely claiming that the F-35 was something it could never be - a replacement for the F-22. Ironically, the F-35 pioneering technology developments in some ways enabled the rapid development of a true 6th Gen F-22 replacement that meets current needs