Page 32 - Lessons-Learned-at-Pax-River_Neat

And then the other side of it is, if you waited, would you really have solved that problem?

I don’t know.

It is a question of balance. Every program manager is going to be subject to demands to meet the
IOC as quickly as possible versus counter demands that they should’ve waited and fed in
changes to airplanes number one through twenty before going operational. Only when top lead-
ership takes overt possession of the Program Manager’s (PM’s) dilemma is it called concurrency.

We will always want to feed in the air changes to airplanes one through twenty.

But doing development without deployment guarantees you will not have a new asset out there
reshaping capability.

It also guarantees that the impact on operations will be shaped by testers, and not by operators.

An Italian First: The F-35 Crosses the Atlantic and Lands
at Pax River, February 5, 2016

Last week saw one of the worst snow storms ever experienced in the Washington DC
area. And the weather the last couple of days have been rough as well with storms and
heavy rain.

But yesterday after a stormy beginning, the sun peeked through at Naval Air Station,
Pax River, and like Le Bourget many years ago was about to witness and historic first.
At 1430 on February 6th, AF-1 poked its nose into the skies around Pax River and landed
at the facility which functions in an integrated manner with Edwards AFB as the home
of the integrated test team of the F-35.

Historically, allies and partners who operated U.S.-generated aircraft would do so down
the line so to speak as production was generated off of US lines. For example, the first
flight by the U.S. of the F-16 was in 1977. The first F-16s came to Italy in 2004 on a lease
to make up for shortfalls in Typhoons in the Italian Air Force fleet.

Second Line of Defense Lessons Learned at Pax River
! !3 1