a1bill's original posting:,
The Marines seem happy enough with May, OT-1
The Marine Corps said it does not agree with all of the conclusions and opinions outlined by the D-OT&E in the POGO report, due to what it called a lack of context and qualifying information, according to a statement provided to CNN.
vs
LO's original posting:
Hogwash.
It was called an Operational Test. After its "successful" conclusion, the aircraft was declared operational.
a1 bill,
I am a no BS kind of guy, what I post here is based on experiences and knowledge. I deal in the world of reality. And I like and admire the USMC, two of my nephews were Marines.
You can use whatever acronyms you want to to describe the test on the ocean, but it was an orchestration to confirm the USMC version of the F-35 was good to go in terms of IOC as demanded coming from the USMC top level. You need to understand the inter-workings of the Pentagon, starting at the top, to understand a point.
There is a daily inter-service war that goes on in the Pentagon at the top, especially when program funding is either short of supply or unequally dispersed. Do you think for one moment the top levels USAF or the USN are pleased with the way the USMC has sopped up money made available to the F-35 program for the most complicated and costly of the three F-35 versions to meet its unrealistic IOC date, never caving? After all, the Marines don't normally use "Fast Jets" to go downtown but generally operate somewhere in the hinterlands as a close in support function to land base forces. The downtown is a USN or USAF job. The top echelon of the USMC response to ongoing internal Pentagon stealth backbiting was to prove they were on target all the way.
If the Wasp happened to sink or the F-35s failed to land, takeoff, or crashed trying, then it would have been a problem. None of that happened, just a couple of hands full of glitches that need lots of work. So on that basis, the big USMC brass, after a brief conference, proudly announced and flew the blimp stating "Mission Accomplished". (somewhere I heard that before). Noo, it was never suspect that word of what took place on the Wasp would ever make it beyond the top deck of the Pentagon. So the disagreement with the publicized DoD report as the USMC reported to CNN is simply a face saving maneuver that occurs in many places, e.g., "we really didn't mean that, we meant this", (I have heard that before recently - L-M.)
So, I would say there are some USN and USAF brass laughing up their sleeves over the good showing on the Wasp and the preparedness of the USMC to declare, "We are IOC ready". Sometimes, being the leader of the pack isn't good. Often the "Coming in Last" award is presented when the dust has cleared and egos are soothed given time over a few cocktails.
TD