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 rolled out new interim height standards for Career Enlisted Aviators aimed at improving aircrew diversity and “safely meeting accession demands,” as the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center works to update a 1967 anthropometric study used to establish USAF flight requirements for more than half a century.…