More F-35 Lot 8 Details

The Lot 8 contract for F-35 strike fighters signed Friday carried some additional agreements covering the program, according to a program office statement. In addition to continuing Lockheed Martin’s agreement to cover “100 percent of all cost overruns,” the contact says the two parties will share the savings from cost underruns, to the tune of 20 percent for the government and 80 percent for Lockheed Martin. There’s also a clause that the two parties will share equally any costs arising from known concurrency problems associated with the system development and demonstration phase, which runs until 2017. “Newly discovered concurrency changes identified during the LRIP 8 production period will be authorized via engineering change proposals,” a system program office spokesman said, but he couldn’t say whether that means the government will pick up the tab. “The assumption is (that) concurrency should end/diminish greatly when SDD ends,” he said in an emailed statement. The cost burden of those changes also “depends on future contract clauses,” he added. The government pays F-35 program fees based on achievement of performance milestones, not by a calendar system.