I have just reread the POGO report on the F-35A Ready for Training OUE and I have to say that it seems to be very well balanced report. Don't be tempted to imagine it's biased against the F-35A just because it exposes its considerable deficiencies - that is the point of conducting the evaluation and there would be some serious questions to answer had the team failed to expose actual and potential operational and air worthiness issues.
I would have loved to have seen this level of scrutiny published during the early days of a number of other programmes.
The purpose of any evaluation is not to say how well the programme is going, it is to discover faults and short-falls and make recommendations. This report does that very well. The fact that there are so many failings at this stage is, indeed, unfortunate. We now await some serious technological progress in order to rectify the issues and move the programme forward.
http://pogoarchives.org/straus/ote-i...o-20130215.pdf