Marine F-35 Jump-Jet PR: Caveataxpayer Emptor

http://nation.time.com/2013/03/27/marine-f-35-jump-jet-pr-caveataxpayer-emptor/



A Marine F-35B Lightening II Joint Strike Fighter prepares to land vertically at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Ariz., March 21. "This marks the first vertical landing of a Marine Corps F-35B outside of a testing environment," the corps said.

Marine F-35 Jump-Jet PR: Caveataxpayer Emptor
By Winslow Wheeler
March 27, 2013

The Marines issued a flashy press release last week: “first operational F-35B conducts initial Vertical Landing.” It was an amateurish, somewhat slimy piece of hype.

In one important way, the press release contradicted itself, and in another it inadvertently revealed one of the many reasons why the Marines’ Short Take-Off and Vertical Landing (STOVL) version of the F-35 – that’s the F-35B — will never be the battlefield-based close-combat support bomber the Marines like to advertise it as.

~snip~

The press release, which was formatted as if it were some sort of news article, inadvertently cued alert readers to the fact that this “first” “operational” “STOVL flight for an F-35B outside of the test environment” was flown by a test pilot.

~snip~

In the world of F-35-double-talk, it is apparently reasonable to announce flights as operational when they are flown by test pilots.