Seems unsporting?

Maybe because he was starting to turn readers off with his biased 'reporting'.

Regards,

Greg
 
Well, Stephen Trimble suggests part of the issue is what he recently wrote about his visit to LM Ft. Worth. However it was on Facebook -- which is as far from any presumption of "unbiased reporting" as one could get.
 
What did he write about the Fort Worth plant?

I consider myself a supporter of the F-35 program, simply because two separate fighter programs (one AV-8 replacement and one F-16/F-18 replacement) seems impossible with the current budget. Bill Sweetman's reporting on the F-35's lack of agility or range concerned me. Yet was he becoming emotionally invested in seeing the program fail?
 
Should have happened long ago. Anybody who's been following his rants on Ares could see he was biased. He made the comment once (I wish I'd copied it) in one of his posts that he felt the success of the F-35 would mean the death of European fighter development. He used Ares as his own personal "Bash the F-35" soapbox. I'm surprised it took this long.
 
Haven't followed this reporting, but I think he's a top-notch writer nevertheless, with an effortless style and natural flow. Google books has quite a lot of material from him. Here's some takes from the JSF book for one:
books.google.com

Ultimate Fighter

Ultimate Fighter tells how a series of little-known technology programs coalesced into a 3,000-airplane plan--the F-35 joint strike fighter (JSF). As one of the first major aircraft programs to start from scratch in the era of information technology, the JSF virtually flies itself, while the...
books.google.com

Maybe he can write stuff on this issue himself. I wonder if in this age of internet one could become more independent of the traditional publications or form less formal "circle of professionals" style content production facilities with less of all those corporate problems.

Also, as someone who has followed the US space program(s) quite closely for the last 6 or so years, the lack of any quality media reporting on NASA and the whole Ares debacle has been very noticeable. Investigative and bold (dare I say activist?) journalists are lacking there. Most are just forwarding the rosy NASA press releases about ever changing designs with large fundamental design problems that don't progress much towards first flight while billions burn. Nasaspaceflight.com and Florida Today probably were the only ones doing some inside work...
 
I am not sure of what was wrong in writing "bullshit is expected to be dense throughout the mission". Any reporter who is given a plant tour by business and development types WILL get BS sandwiches fed to him/her. I hope I am not revealing some long lost truth here. And I am not even singling out Lockmart, it's the same with any aerospace organization (although LM must have the creme de la creme BS#@%tters on their payroll just because they can afford it).

If the problem is that Sweetman has an opinion and does not limit himself to reporting the plain facts, then how is that worse than non-journalist, non-technically-educated bloggers paid by LM to spread the F-35 gospel?

Seriously, if LM delivered half of what they promised, were on schedule and on cost there would be no cannon fodder for people to criticize. Incidentally, i want to see the F-35 succeed ('cause we bet the farm on it and there is no alternative), but as a taxpayer i have the obligation to be outraged if i will end up with less than i was promised.
 

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