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ruary 4, its mate AL-1 will fly across the Atlantic fueled by an Italian KC-767A tanker to
Pax River for further testing.

This is just another example of the collaborative approach built into the F-35 program.

Editor’s Note: What the Pax River testers are doing is concurrent testing, not serial
testing. As the testers made clear throughout the visit, this is the way ahead, not go-
ing back to serial testing.

Secretary Wynne made this point during a visit to Eglin AFB in the fall of 2013.

After his presentation to the leadership of the 33rd Fighter Wing, Secretary Wynne was asked to
discuss the challenge of what is called concurrency. The answer by Wynne provided one of the
best understandings of the reality of the approach taken in the modern aerospace industry.

There would have to be concurrency no matter when you started the process.

Because we tend, in industry, to hire to a very tight line; enough to get the job done; but not
enough to be accused of introducing an overrun. As a result, we do not see the funding to the full
up line that industry would like to maximize efficiencies.

And industry will not put people on until they get slightly behind schedule. This is because
we’re so worried about people cutting the program back, as the start is usually contentious, and
up the line customers threaten to leave us high and dry and having to lay off a bunch of recently
hired people.

And the other thing is one does not discover many problems until we get later in the program.
The top-level design is roughly perfect; with the devil in the details. This is called integration.

Concurrency tends to sway like a pendulum of a clock from we want to involve the users early
because we want the user feedback, and we want the engineers to get beat up and understand
that they screwed up in the design. This is called direct feedback.

But you can’t get that if you wait, wait, wait, wait, and then have the tests and all your engi-
neers have gone onto other projects, and they never actually meet the user because we waited so
long.

Second Line of Defense Lessons Learned at Pax River
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