Page 39 - Renorming of Airpower: The F-35 Enters the Combat Fleet

The Renorming of Airpower: The F-35 Arrives into the Combat Force

After witnessing the initial sorties n May 26, 2015, a panel was held at the end of the visit with several
Marine Corps and Navy participants in OT-1. The material presented provided a good overview on the tests
and the progress to date.

The participants in the panel were as follows:

• Captain Andrew Smith, USN, USS Wasp Executive Officer, ESG 2;
• Major Richard Rusnok, USMC, VMX-22 F-35B Det Officer-in-Charge, F-35 Detachment, Edwards AFB

and the lead planner for OT-1;
• Major Aric Liberman, USMC, VMFA-121 Special Projects Officer, Yuma, Arizona;
• Major Brendan Walsh, USMC, FMFA-121 Operations Officer, Yuma, Arizona;
• Major Paul Hoist, USMC, VMFA-501, Director of Safety and Standardization, Beaufort, SC;
• SSgt William Sullivan, USMC, VMX-22 Airframes Division Chief, F-35 Detachment Edwards AFB;
• Lt. Cdr. Neil Mathieson, Royal Navy, UK F-35B Ship Air Integration Lead, UK MOD< Abbeywood,

Bristol,
• Lt. Cdr. Beth Kitchen, Royal Navy, OT-1Evoultions Lead, VFMA-501, Beaufort, SC
• Also joining was Major Mike “Gravy” Roundtree, who discussed maintenance issues as the maintainers

were working on the planes for the afternoon sorties and exercises.
•
Captain Smith, the XO of the ship, provided an overview on activities aboard the USS WASP.

“The primary purpose of this event was to take what we’ve done with the F-35 in developmental testing and
handing the effort now to the operators. DT1 and DT2 were very data driven exercises, where we went out
and tried to exercise the aircraft in order to get test points.

What we’re trying to do now is to develop the tactics, techniques, and procedures of operating this aircraft at
sea effectively and efficiently. From the perspective of planning this event, we have taken five different
squadrons and multiple other organizations, technical experts across the joint program office, industry
operational test team, we brought them out as well.

And the idea was to take six aircraft, which is the same size as the Marine expeditionary unit, which would be
a normally deployed six-plane detachment which is part of that rotation, and take them out here and exercise
them aboard the ship. We can then learn how to make this aircraft function as a normal deployed aircraft
outside of the normal test, developmental test environment.

Our primary focus here has been upon supportability. That was one of our major emphases. If you look at
what General Davis and his team put together as priorities for what they wanted us to look at while we’re out
here, the vast majority of those were focused on supportability.

LT CDR Kitchen together along with the other maintenance officers, put together an extensive list of items that
we wanted to make sure that were functional at sea.

That goes from the mundane like changing a tire to the complex, like changing an engine. Doing those
evolutions at sea is a different animal.

You’ve got chains, you’ve got deck motion, you’ve got all those space constraints that you saw down in the
hangar deck that you don’t have ashore. We want to make sure that any differences that we saw from
support ashore to afloat were properly documented and we make those changes with the ultimate goal of
making the deployment for the very first squadron that’s going to go to sea as easy as possible.

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