After Years of Delays, the Lightning Graduates From Low-Rate Initial Production
The F-35 Lightning II, first taking to the skies in 2006, has finally been approved for full, genuine, actual showtime-ready mass production. There are almost a thousand of the fighters out there in the wild already, but they've been built under provisionary Low-Rate Initial Production guidelines, limiting the scope of orders and allowing a little more variation until they could definitively identify the final mark to run with. It's a very delayed milestone, coming more than 20 years after the Joint Strike Fighter program really got to work on designing it, but it's finally come to pass.
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