Orlando, February 18, 2010—Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz in January said he didn’t think the F-35 program would suffer a Nunn-McCurdy breach. (Defense Secretary Bob Gates said more recently he wasn’t certain either.) That law says a program must be restructured if cost or schedule falls seriously out of hand. Now, though, Schwartz said an F-35 Nunn-McCurdy breach is “a possibility; maybe even likely.” What changed in the last few weeks? “I now know more than I did then,” Schwartz asserted.
The Air Force is on track to reach its annual goal of graduating 1,500 new pilots that had proved elusive to this point, one year after the service launched a sweeping overhaul of its undergraduate pilot training program, Air Education and Training Command said Sept. 14.
