The F-35 Will Soon Move To Full Rate Production

The official acronym is not yet revealed for pushing out 100 F-35's a year from Lockheed's Big Texas doors. Winging It, after exhaustive research has come up with FRP replacing the LRIP status over the next year. Low Rate Initial Production or LRIP has been the constant reference since 2007 as the chart below reveals.

F-35 History Chart:

As of March 31, 2017 Lockheed Martin has delivered 231 of the F-35's V generation. Looking at the chart above are the Salmon colored lines worth noting. The first line marks about 210 F-35's delivered by mid-January 2017, completing the contracts for LRIP 1-8. Lot 12 denotes FRP moniker.

However, 2017 will start burning through the LRIP-9 contract “back lot” during 2017, resulting in a breaching of its LRIP-10 lot in the first half of 2018. There are two terms in play in the above chart. One is the noted LRIP contract unit number and the other is the actual production number delivered. The far right column is just a pacing number not based on actual deliveries but a straight slope for LRIP contract delivery pacing. When the LRIP-10 contract units enter the factory floor, Lockheed will rapidly approach FRP as the chart indicates a predictive FRP status for contract lot 12. An arbitrary pace increase is exampled by a 100 unit jump when LRIP-9 units are being built. Currently as mentioned the Lockheed/F-35 has finally exhausted the LRIP-8 contract backlog and now has about 25 % of the LRIP-9 contract units completed when it reached 231 units delivered at the end of March 2017.  

A convoluted view of having two quantitative attributes in play with contract numbers and its actual production numbers examined, but understanding both numbers helps for future reading when a report says 231 F-35's have been delivered an observer can see what contract is the 231st unit has come from and how many F-35's are expected in a current year. As of the end of March, 2017, it could be expected about seventy more F-35's will be delivered in 2017.