Page 42 - Renorming of Airpower: The F-35 Enters the Combat Fleet

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

And actually one of many that we’ve seen throughout the week where we see an issue, we’re working the
issue and we’re confident that there will be a solution by the end of the day.

Lt. Cdr. Kitchen: I can cover maintenance supervision lessons.

I think from my perspective this has been a very positive detachment.

Because what we’ve actually demonstrated is almost all of the maintenance evolutions that have been
attempted we are now confident we can now conduct at sea. There have been lessons identified where some
of the equipment doesn’t necessarily interact with the ship’s facilities.

But these are all things that can be easily rectified. For example, we wouldn’t be able to conduct a lift fan
movement installation today only because we need an additional shackle that interfaces between the ship’s
overhead crane and our lifting equipment.

This is a very simple piece of equipment to source and with this detachment it can be resolved. It’s the same
with a number of issues like that.

So, from a program perspective this has been successful.

A lot of observations will be sent back to the joint planning office and there are people who will be taking
those lessons.

I’m not going to be requesting many procedural changes to joint technical documentation. The tools that
maintainers use though, I’ll allow SSG Sullivan to elaborate in a second, all seem to be fit for its purpose.

Even things like the automated logistic information system have gone exceptionally well here. We haven’t
struggled with connectivity. None of the maintainers have reported that it has been any slower than it is on
shore. Which is a huge positive step for us.

Every detachment will have lessons to learn so we can evolve and make everything better and quicker. And
those are things that we are going to be taking back.

But the headline news is we are confident that we can maintain these aircraft at sea for periods of time…..

Question: What about flying the aircraft on and off the ship? How did that go?

Captain Andrew Smith: The aircraft itself flies fantastically. It’s an incredibly smooth flying airplane that is
much easier to fly from a pilot perspective than the Harrier was, especially around the ship and the ship
environment. The training we did for this detachment was much less than the training we did in a Harrier fleet
to get to a ship.

And that’s just a testament to the ease of the airplane to fly, the pilot vehicle interface, as well as the
simulators that we have on shore that allow us to recreate to a high degree of detail the ship environment.

We took pilots from across the spectrum. From East Coast, West Coast, Harrier, Hornet, two-seat, single seat,
ship experience, no ship experience since flight school and we put them on this deck very easily in a very short
amount of time with a short amount of adapting to the ship environment.

And you saw the results today.

It is a testament to the ease of the airplane, to its design specifications to how they execute those design
specifications, and how easy it is for us to just adapt to flying the airplane.
Second Line of Defense

Page 41