US Marines near start of F-35 fighter training flights

Top US Marine Corps officials hailed progress on the next-generation F-35B fighter jet built by Lockheed Martin Corp and said military training flights could be approved by late March or early April.
Assistant Marine Corps Commandant General Joseph Dunford said there was clearly "irreversible momentum" on the Marine Corps version of the new fighter jet, which came out from under the threat of cancellation in January, when the Pentagon took it off "probation" a year ahead of schedule.
"We really feel pretty good about where we are today," Dunford said in an interview on Friday after a ceremony marking the arrival of three F-35B jets at Eglin Air Force Base in north-western Florida, where Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps pilots and mechanics will be trained on the stealthy jets.
Eglin is home to the largest fleet of F-35s anywhere at the moment: six conventional takeoff and landing F-35A models, built for the Air Force, and three F-35B models, which can take off from shorter runways and hover and land like a helicopter. "You can just sense when success starts to feed success, and it's the snowball that starts to roll, and I really believe  that's where we are today," Dunford said.
Lockheed Chief Executive Robert Stevens and other top Lockheed executives also flew in to attend the ceremony, which was held in one of two cavernous, brand new hangars built at the air base to house the Navy and Marine Corps jets. Stevens, a former Marine, said the start of training would be another step forward for the Pentagon's biggest weapons program, a "hugely ambitious" project to replace over a dozen fighter planes in use all over the world with three variants of a single airplane design.
"We're getting closer to the initial operational capability and the deployment of that jet," Steven told Reuters after addressing over 200 people at the hangar ceremony. "Every pilot says, 'Give me this airplane.' They're anxious to get started."
Dunford said the F-35B brought together stealth, supersonic speed, vertical landing and other capabilities never before seen in a single plane. "The F-35B is more than just a new fighter. By replacing so many different capabilities in our arsenal it represents a new way of doing business," he said in his speech.
Defence Secretary Leon Panetta defended his decision to lift the F-35B probation in a letter to the leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who argued the move was "premature." Panetta said he was "acutely aware of the many challenges" still facing the F-35 program, and continued to monitor it closely.
Dunford's endorsement of the jet comes as the Pentagon is restructuring the program for the third time in recent years, postponing orders for 179 planes to save $15.1 billion over the next five years. Officials insist it still plans to spend $382 billion for a total of 2,443 F-35s over the next decades. Those plans have prompted Washington's eight international partners on the multirole fighter to rethink their own orders. Canada has invited officials from the other countries - Britain, Australia, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy and Turkey - to meet in Washington next week to get an update on the program.