The Air Force is set to begin training on the F-35 next month following the certification of the 33rd Fighter Wing’s program at Eglin AFB, Fla., the service said yesterday.
An independent evaluation of the training at Eglin over the last few months was recently completed. The assessment looked at the training of several pilots who were transitioning from flying F-16s and A-10s.
The Air Force plans to enroll 36 pilots into the training program in January to fly the F-35A variant of the Joint Strike Fighter, with plans to build that up to 100 pilots annually. The program also was certified to train maintenance personnel.
“We can now saw that we are ready for training,” Col. Andrew Toth, 33d Fighter Wing commander, told reporters on a conference call. The initial pilots will be trained as instructors before transitioning to schooling operational pilots in 2015, he said.
Meanwhile, more details have emerged on the terms of the contract inked Friday between the Pentagon and F-35 prime contractor Lockheed Martin [LMT] for the fifth low-rate initial production (LRIP 5) run of 32 aircraft.
The Pentagon said after deadline Friday that fighter jets are projected to come in 4 percent cheaper than the preceding batch, with the contract at a total value of $3.8 billion.
The 22 F-35A variants are expected to cost $105 million per jet, while the three Marine Corps’ F-35B short takeoff and vertical landing version are expected to cost $113 million. The Navy’s seven carrier variant F-35Cs are slated to cost $125 million each.
For LRIP 5, Lockheed Martin agreed to accept 55 percent of overrun costs, compared to evenly splitting it with the Pentagon in LRIP 4. Lockheed Martin will bear all of the cost of the overrun if it exceeds 112 percent.
The Pentagon and Lockheed Martin will equally share any redevelopment–known as concurrency–costs. Concurrency burden sharing was said to be a key source of contention during negotiations over the contract during the past year.
The F-35 program has been mired in controversy over massive cost overruns and delays. It is now estimated it will cost $395 billion to produce the planned 2,443 fighter jets with a total life time cost, which includes maintenance and operations, expected to exceed $1 trillion over the next five decades.