Test test test test test. Test test test test. Second question, maintenance part. I meant to touch on this. Im grateful for you bringing that up. Its not just the parts on base. Its the warehousing of the parts. Its how far they are away. The limited number of parts that are in that system. Maybe equally important is the average maintainers visibility and to where the parts are in the system. The in transient visibility is not there. The most important guy for maintenance is the Maintenance Group commander out at hill for that location. He cant tell you when you order a part, alice says its going to be here in four days and two hours and alice schedules your people for you, so you got tom and orville and doug and jamie and you take your best maintainers to go over to this really hard fix and theyre going to be there in four days and four hours when this part shows up. The part doesnt arrive that day. When is it going to show up . Well, thats hard to figure out. So this side, the logistical pipeline is really complicated. If you think im making light of it, im not. If you think im throwing rocks, im not. This has to be fixed. The ability for maintenance to out produce aircraft for operators to fly right now is alive. They produce more flyable aircraft than the pilots at Hill Air Force base can fly right now. And yet, theyre struggling with parts. To think what they would do when this system is fully up to speed. They have these updates that come out for software that goes into alice. Theyre big trodrops and they c out about every year. The next one is supposed to come out j. R. , do you know when its coming out. September. When that drop is coming out, i got to tell you, every maintainer at Hill Air Force base cant wait. The last update was so much better than the previous one and theyre really banking on this one actually coming in and fixing the major things that are left to fix in the system. That was a long answer, wasnt it . Yes. Sorry. Thank you very much for a great presentation. Major johnson. [ inaudible ] working on the l. O. R. For this platform. However, you know i really appreciate your approach. An interview with the pilots. Everything is classified about this platform. We struggle a lot. There is a country which sign up the contract and doesnt have a classified briefing about some sensors. So its not very for a community to encourage our bosses to spend a lot of money for this platform. Thank you very much for that. It helps me a lot. Like said, theres a lot of marketing. Thats kind of you know something to build our awareness about the platform. I would like to ask you about the virtual constructive, live virtual constructive concept. The cost of flying the new platform is very high. I know theyre looking to reduce it to 25,000 per hour, which is great number if you compare with platform. But still, many countries like israel, italy, they working very hard. Like visual constructive to reduce the number of the sources generated, the tren gator the red forces. How the f35, the simulators are designed to help with in this area. Its a great question. If i come back to the bottom line, how are the simulators designed to help in this world . So live virtual constructive basically takes airplanes that are flying and airplanes that are on the ground and then it adds a Simulation Program in the middle of that, that will throw out threats, that will throw out enemy fighters and they will all be woven in together. Live virtual constructive. The f35 has this constructive it has a piece inside of the airplane. What it is, is a program, and you as an operator can go in and say, when i fly into the area, i want an s400 or s300 to trigger. I want it to alert the formation and i want it to target everybody in the formation. So you get to the point and it does this for you. Right . Which is Pretty Amazing of the let me set that aside and say in the simulator, you have a simulator operator and hes looking and going, that looks about right, okay. Hes crossing the line and he hits the button and says youre illuminated by an s400, one of the sum components. You go, well, thats great. Then when fires a missile at you, he goes, well, looks like you did everything right, the missile missed you. Or oh, you didnt the missile hit you. All of the calculations, all of the estimations are on the back of the simulator. Theres no automation and really, this is a huge gap. This is a huge gap. Now, lets go to real world. Im out flying the f35, the f35 knows everything about itself. It knows when it turns this many degrees away from you, it knows it radar crosssection. How easily it is for you to target me or how hard it is. It knows what your missile range is, it knows how fast that missile flies and it can give itself a probability of survival, if you will. Not that you have to do that real world. But it can do that. Through its Threat Library. So the jet does it all. The simulator operator has to do that looks about right. Literally, thats what it is. You didnt execute this exactly right. I think the radar crosssection would have given you away your debt. The piece thats in the middle of the software, that software, you have to tell the system to turn it on and you have to tell it the other attributes of you. So you have to give it all. It does not take the Threat Library from the airplane that that program is resident in. You have to tell it just like youre a simulator operator back home. On top of that, its really hard to load all of that stuff up. When youre sitting down and youre trying to mission plan, its very archaic. You have to send somebody to school to learn how to operate this Little Program and the guys who have been to that school hate the program. Its really hard to use. Its very cumbersome and they dont like it. These three pieces are there. And they function relatively well together. With a couple of exceptions. The simulator, they have this distributed Mission Training thing where you can actually fly a sim and your buddy can fly a sim and his buddy and his buddy. A maximum of four simulators. Its a maximum of four. The f35 doesnt fly with four ships. By and large, its much larger packages than that. So you dont have the opportunity and the Mission Training module thats out there right now that needs to be expanded. Now, is that going to be expanded . It is but its coming very slowly. The first location, i think, j. R. , is going to be Nellis Air Force base that gets this expanded distributed Mission Training module. Thats where you can go to, i think, 16 airplanes. All told, youve got the components there. But we need to make more investments. Lets go with this embedded training module. The program thats in the airplane, because of the challenges and funding through sequestration, the gutting of funding from other ways and the cost overruns of the program, you actually took this embedded Training Program and reduced its capability significantly. It was going to do magical stuff, but now its basically where i told you. Its archaic sand hard to use. So if the joint Program Office threw more money at this and actually had that program pull the threat data from the Threat Library, right from the airplane, it would be a real simulation. If they could make it where you plug and play, you could put the airplanes where the sand threats and the fighters out there and you just drop them on your Mission Training program, then it would be so much easier to use and it would reduce the Mission Planning time the crews need to do. It would be a complete solution. Youll find all that in the paper. Coming back, did i answer your question . One thing. Is it possible to fly in a simulators as a training against the real plane . Thats one of the, almost 25 to 40 of our mission is just training aid. I believe thats right, j. R. Can you answer that question . The concept is there. Its not been put into the focus has been for a number of years on how we do live virtual constructive training. Nobody has cracked that egg completely. The. The part and pieces are there. It hasnt been put together yet. Long answer. Any other questions . So i spent a little bit of time what time is it. We have another minute or twochlt i spent a little time talking about how much flying time that people needed. I actually asked this question. If you had the opportunity to fly more, would you . Most guys said, well, you know, i have extra additional duties. Okay, let me turn this around the for you. When i was flying, i needed a lot of bananas. I needed them on a recurring basis. If you gave me two bananas a week, i probably got worse at everything. Just a little bit. It took me a while to remember exactly how to go i had to think about maneuvering my airplane to go beat somebody else. If you gave me three sorties a week, i could staep all of the things that you asked me to do pretty well. If you gave me four or more a week, i got better at everything. Its the repetitive nature of this. Over the course of my air force life, this has been the mantra that most Fighter Pilots have said. Two, three and four. Does that still apply . I asked that to every f35 pilot that i met. What they gave me was pretty startling. Slide number 8. So does this 2, 3, 4 mantra apply . If you look at the experienced pilot, youll see that 17 of the 21 that i asked said absolutely and four of them said, you could probably reduce that number by one. These are experienced pilots. All in excess of 800 hours of fighter time and another fighter and 2 to 300 hours in the f35. Look at the center. Every first assignment Fighter Pilot said that, every one of them said that. When you begin to think that you have all the answers because youre experienced and youve lost sight of how many bananas as a young person in order to do the mission, its easy for you to step aside. Ill do a quick question. How much sorties a week do you think the average air force Fighter Pilot is getting right now . You think hes getting two . Three . Or four . Go to slide 9. Go to the next slide. This is disheartening. So if you look up there, the average f35 guy got 4. 2 sorties a month, thats one a week. Doesnt even get to two. F22, five sorties a month. 1. 25. The hour totals, this is discouraging. When i was getting ready to fight of soviet hordes during the cold war, we knew the average guy needed 200 hours a year and even experienced, if they got less than 150 hours of flying time a year, you couldnt take them to combat because they would, one, not survive and two, probably take you down because of their inabilities in the airplane. They were saturated with their task. Look at how many Fighter Pilots got more than 150 hours last year. Thats where we wouldnt take anybody to combat. That threshold. Only the f15e community on average made it above that at 151 hours a year. This is something the air force need to turn on and its something we will highlight again. If youre in the Aviation Community and you have a fighter background at all, you know the numbers resonate. They resonate hardandfast. Were at a point right now when guys are getting one sortie a week, youre having to think about everything. If you remember, there was a movie, right stuff, a couple of years ago. One of the astronauts got in the cockpit and hes by himself and its alan shepherd, i think his prayer is lord, please dont let me mess up today. Only he didnt use the word mess up. When youre in an airplane and flying one sortie a week, one of the the things youre thinking is lord, please dont let me mess up. Were putting these kid in a square corner. We need to get them out of it. Ill leave you with that. Any other questions . Tom, do you have anything else . Yes, sir. Thank you very much. My name is todd wiggins. Meet me d. C. Is my site. I have a pedestrian question which i dont believe has been covered. With respect to vertical takeoff versus traditional longrange ascent and decline, do you have a preference and have you any thoughts about the future as to how viable vertical takeoff will continue to be . Thats a great question. So the f35b is the marine corps variant and its whats called a stovall variant. Short takeoff, vertical land. It needs maybe a thousand feet, maybe a little longer runway than that in order to take off with a full load of gas and munitions. When it comes back, because its burned off a lot of gas and dropped a lot of munitions, it can come back and do a vertical landing. The marines have had this in their requirement bin since they got the harrier. Theyre still flying the harrier and they love it because of its ability to go forward, be close to their troops and you can have a jet basically take off vertically or nearly so and go out in a short distance, employ that ordinance and come back and land and do that over and over and get a lot of repetitions in and help their guys on the ground. So do i think that this is a viable argument . I love the argument. I love t i would love to give the marines as many of those airplanes as they want. The marines are also buying the c model, the carrier version with a larger wing thats not vertical takeoff and land. Their basic number one premise is the guys and gals on ground, our job is to support them and be there and as quickly as we can and get as closely as we can to that fight as we can. If you look at another odd argument, todd, i want as many targets for the enemy to shoot at as possible. I know thats a horrible thing. But i want them to be so recognized with the number of avenues that i can as a United States airman or United States military person, i want to hit them from so many directions they have to defend in all of them. By having this stovall platform, i have that many more directions that they have to defend. Does it reduce your performance with regard to how the airplane operates . There are tradeoffs. Last thing ill say is, john jumper back in 2002, 2004, time frame, actually was going to buy a b Model Variant for the air force to replace the a10. The reason why he was going to do that in my head anyway, is you want to preserve that Incredible Community we have with the a10. They do air to ground, close air support, its their bread and butterment anybody can drop in a low thread environment, even i can do that and have, or you can employ where theres nobody shooting at you. When somebody is shooting at you, you have to know the mindset and the nomenclature and everything about the people youre supporting and the people that youre trying to kill on the other side. Before you leave, on behalf of the air force association, tom, thank you. Too often in this town we talk about those who would risk their lives as we approach memorial day. J. B. , thank you very much. As you went and talked to those who are going to give their lives for our country, gave them a voice. On behalf of air force, thank you very much. Thank you. Thats beautiful. Well, thank you, sir. Very, very grateful. Any final questions . Thank you so much for coming. Have a great weekend. I think theres a lunch in the lobby. Lets give one final round of applause to j. B. [ applause ] were live on cspan 3 for an allday conference on race and technology hosted by New York University and the International Communication association. Were going to start off this morning with remarks by nyr professor of media culture and communication Charlton Mcilwain and a look at whats at stake with race and technology. Youre watching live coverage here on cspan 3. Expecting this to get started momentarily. Watching all day coverage hosted by new york universities and the International Communication association. Expecting it to start in just a moment. Throughout the day today hearing about legal and policy frame works for understanding the impact of Digital Technology on race. Then later on, around 2 00 eastern time, redefining technology, a roundtable on interventions and resistance. Also this afternoon, justice, inclusion and imagining and building alternative platforms. In the keynote at 5 00 p. M. Eastern on Artificial Intelligence and the new jim code. Then later this evening, well look at northeast africa and at 8 00 p. M. On American History tv, code talkers. Again, just waiting for this conversation to start hosted by New York University. Live here on cspan 3