“The power gap was caused by flawed design estimates based on the average power demand over several seconds”, says J D McFarlan, air vehicle integrated product team leader. “We’ll be billing this “cost overrun” to the various governments involved in the contract, over time, and hope to be greatly rewarded for our stupidity.”
This comes as no surprise. Lockheed was $100 million over budget during the flyoff with the X-32 and if the government hadn’t let them off the hook for that screw up Boeing would have won the contract by default.