No. of Recommendations: 1
...not airlines.
As offered before, because the War Dept will put up with sloth than no airline would tolerate.
Article posted on the Fool, about how WD pays incentives to try to motivate vendors to perform per contract. Contractors, like Lockheed, still do not perform per contract, but WD pays the incentives anyway.
U.S. Government Accountability Office: F-35 Joint Strike Fighter: Actions Needed to Address Late Deliveries and Improve Future Development
In 2024, aircraft deliveries were late by an average of 238 days. To encourage timely delivery, among other things, DOD paid the contractors hundreds of millions in incentives over the last several years. Nonetheless, delivery time frames continued to worsen—but DOD continued to pay incentives.
nationaldefensemagazine.org - Just in f program plagued by cost delivery overruns gao says
With the goal of improving on-time product delivery, the Pentagon’s F-35 program has worked to establish pay incentives to the contractors and has paid “hundreds of millions of dollars of performance incentive fees” to the contractors in recent years, the report said.
Even with this effort, “delivery time frames continue to worsen” and fees are still paid, the report said.If Boeing did that to an airline, the airline would bury them with backcharges. But Boeing sees Lockheed getting away with this sort of garbage, and says "to heck with airlines, we want to sell to WD"
Steve
