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By Geoff Fein
After Sunday's first flight of its Navy version of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), Lockheed Martin [LMT] has now flown all three variants and is preparing to begin delivering full missionized aircraft to the services in the coming year.
Additionally, Sunday's flight marked the first for the production configured Pratt & Whitney [UTX] engine, which includes a number of improvements.
And, on Monday, the first mission systems-equipped F-35B (BF-4) short takeoff/vertical landing (STOVL) arrived at Naval Air Station (NAS) Patuxent River, Md., to begin testing.
"That will be the first mission system airplane formally entering into testing," Tom Burbage, F-35 executive vice president and general manager for integration, told reporters during a conference call.
The first flight of the F-35C went just as planned, Jeff "Slim" Knowles, Lockheed Martin's F-35 test pilot told reporters during a call earlier this week. "More so than any other test flight I have been on.
"We had planned and rehearsed it extensively over a number of weeks and months and it went exactly according to plan," he said.
The first flight looked primarily at gear down handling to assess how the airplane flies in a landing...