Proficiency in Every Sense

For the airplane aficionado, the appeal of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) is clearly its sleek, powerful contours and its stealth capacity. For the military, JSF symbolizes combat air dominance with next-generation, affordable tactical aircraft. But for the engineering connoisseur whom revels in "all that truly works", the Joint Strike Fighter program exemplifies proficiency in every sense of the word. It puts the "high" in the high-tech realm of aviation, engineering, manufacturing and inspection technologies.

Lockheed Martin (Fort Worth, TX) leads the effort to bring the Joint Strike Fighter to fruition. Partnering with Northrop Grumman and BAE SYSTEMS, Lockheed has formed the JSF Team – a group of industry experts pouring ingenuity to areas critical to the program's success. These specialists focus on one principal concept: a common design with affordable, and supportable variants that fulfills the distinct needs of each military service. The resounding mandate of the JSF project is leaner-than-lean manufacturing based upon a technical recipe called "the digital thread". It is this methodology that will capture the heart of any engineer or IT professional involved in streamlining product development. In a nutshell, the JSF program embraces elite conceptto-asset practices without reinventing the wheel. . . . .