[AngryJawa]

I'm not saying that producing an F-35 from scratch should take only 9 months. OTOH, it shouldn't take 20 years either.

They are obviously much more complicated, etc. But then again, our engineering and production capabilities are worlds more sophisticated than they were in 1944.

If one follows the money (which is always instructive), one would be pretty tempted to conclude the aerospace manufacturers were making an everlasting meal out of the project at the taxpayers expense, no?

[TalonDJ]

They are obviously much more complicated, etc. But then again, our engineering and production capabilities are worlds more sophisticated than they were in 1944.

More 'sophisticated' does not mean faster. Back then aircraft testing was only one step better than 'lets wip one up and see if it does not crash when we try it'. If you study those times you will also see that for every sucessful fighter like they P-51 there were almost a dozen failed programs that never flew or were failures when they did fly. There are a lot of ways the modern programs are not efficient (I should get back to work) but comparing them to the programs of the 40's is apples and oranges.