Surely every significant project has had significant issues?
Well, yes, except:
- The delays and overruns are of extreme magnitude
- None can be ascribed to political choke-holds on the budget. Yes, production has been delayed, but delayed to match the slipping availability date of an operational aircraft
- As often happens, a stable end-date to development is hard to come by. The 2011 review moved the goalposts by identifying 3i as the AF IOC configuration, prior to formal IOT&E; today, while 3F is the end-of-SDD point, users seem to be regarding Block 4 as the first production configuration that will not require early retrofit for systems that have become dated during the long development.