A long article with only a few excerpts below:
F-35 Production on Track, Program Chief Says 14 Mar 2013 By Claudette Roulo | American Forces Press Service
F-35 Production on Track, Program Chief Says
"The F-35 Lightning II joint strike fighter program is a different program than it was four years ago, the F-35 program executive officer said here yesterday.
In a speech at the McAleese/Credit Suisse Defense Programs Conference at the Newseum, Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher C. Bogdan told attendees that he and his predecessor, Navy Vice Adm. Dave Venlet, worked with Lockheed-Martin and Pratt & Whitney to reform the problem-plagued development program....
...F-35 production is “the shining star” of the program, the general said. About 30 aircraft are being built each year, he said, and the cost per unit has come down with each successive low-rate initial production, or LRIP, lot. Between LRIP 4 and LRIP 5, there was a 4-percent decrease in build costs, Bogdan said, a trend he said he believes will continue until per-unit costs approach the original 2001 estimate of $69 million....
...Bogdan said recent criticisms about technical issues and allegations of limited aft visibility are ill-informed. “I don't lose sleep at night over the technical issues on this program,” he said. There are known solutions for all of the known issues with the aircraft, he added.
“We have yet to fly a single air-to-air engagement with another F-35 or another airplane,” he said. “The airplane's not ready to do that. We're still doing basic training on the airplane, [and] we're still doing basic testing on the airplane. So for someone to assess that the visibility behind the airplane is such that it will 'get gunned down every time,' [is] a little premature."
Bogdan summarized his expectations. “We are trying to instill a level of discipline in this program such that there are no surprises, we have predictable outcomes, (and) when we have problems, we have ways of solving those problems,” he said. “(This is) very hard to do on a very big, complex program that has lots and lots of decision-makers (and) lots and lots of pots of money, but I think that's an absolute necessity to get the program moving in the right direction.”