F-16 had no where near the issues the F-35 does when production was ramped up. It was the weapon of choice for the Israelis in striking Osirak and this was back in 1981 not long after its introduction. This despite the fact that Israelis had F-15s on hand.
Luckily there are books on the F-16 and there is one F-16C design team member still active on internet forums. But for most of this one need not even look into that. All one needs to do is go into history and see how many sub-blocks and sub-variants existed before a stable block 30 configuration was agreed upon and how many aircraft had been produced till then that required hardware changes and frequently back to the factory trips to be brought up to a standard that provided the basic capability that the older fighters had.
That number was well over a 1000. As a contrast, just over 200 operational F-35's (meant for operational or operational training squadrons) have been produced till date and we are months away from completing developmental testing. In fact post 2016 they have stopped tracking F-35 A and B concurrency changes because there are no new discoveries since only developmental testing that remains is weapons carriage envelope and software related. What remains is work on the F-35C that was late to start and always had a slower ramp up given where the Navy would like to fit its acquisition between managing their procurement and that of the Marines which they fund.
It is well known fact that you can research into, or reach out to F-16 historians, design team members and pilots that do post occasionally on other aviation boards.
On the other hand, do you what the program did on the F-35 when they figured out that it had to be re-baselined and will take 5-7 years longer to complete at an added $13-$15 Billion of RDT&E expenditure spread over 3 variants? They checked the hybrid concurrency model by moving production to the right i.e. procurement and buy rate ramp up all moved till close to or well after the completion of developmental testing. This obviously does not fit your "Lockheed created the concurrency model" myth because had it been up to LMA they would have liked to stick to schedule and would have produced well over 500 aircraft by now.
By how much did they move production to the right? For this I would like to point you and others to two documents that are available via google. They are the 2009, and 2015 SAR. As they will show the USAF alone was expected to buy 373 F-35A's between FY 2010 and FY17. As soon as Lt. Generation Bogdon stepped in, re-baselined the program he changed that to just 90 (75% reduction) over the same period.
^ This was done primarily to keep concurrency costs (to the program and three US services) low, reduce the burden of retrofitting hundreds of aircraft with ECO's thereby stressing individual service depot capacity and having 3 different configurations of aircraft flying all of which would have a substantial number. The net result was that the total US services concurrency bill will likely be below $ 2 Billion and production ramp ups in Lot-9 and 10 are happening at a point where they aren't expecting any major change in the F-35A or B since most of the airframe testing on these variants has finished. In fact all developmental testing on these variants would be complete by the time LRIP-10 (most recent orders) final assembly even begins. This is yet another reason why the curves go lower and lower for ECO's at higher Lot numbers.
The 50:50 cost-sharing model forces the industry to do all in its power to introduce changes as they are discovered right into the production process. They can reduce their 50% burden if they bake the changes into the very next lot they are building. As a result, previous discoveries are being baked into production so that they do not have to correct after the jets are produced. New discoveries will obviously need to be but as the program matured there weren't as many significant new discoveries that added a significant concurrency cost. The Engine fire was the last major design concurrency with the retrofits but after a JPO funded desgin ndmodification testing, Pratt and Whitney paid for the installation of those fixes on all previous aircraft and were able to bake in the changes into their production process the very same year. I have provided evidence in support of this on the dedicated JSF thread but
here it is again -
Air Force Lieutenant General Chris Bogdan, the Pentagon's F-35 program chief, told the conference that Pratt had agreed to pay for the cost of fixing the 156 engines already delivered once officials agreed to a proposed design change.
Bogdan said the retrofits should be relatively easy and inexpensive to carry out since the engine is built in modules, which will allow mechanics to swap out the entire fan section.
He said Pratt had also agreed to share the cost of any future design changes with the government. Talks about the next two batches of engines should finish soon, he said.
In fact front line aircraft that are delivered to the squadrons have the concurrency ECO's already built in at the factory. They won't be going back to the depot (except the C) for concurrency changes. They will simply get a software upgrade with the full, bug free Block 3F once developmental testing on it is complete, and all bugs and glitches are sorted out. These are the so called "deficiencies" that the media is reporting..They have to do with Block 3F and as far as the F-35A and B are concerned they pertain to the software configuration and these "deficiencies" are perfectly NORMAL for this stage of testing. The entire point of developmental testing is to test ---> Discover ----> Correct ----> Test. This is what is happening and what was reported a few months ago. It is for this purpose that 3F is only flying on the test jets and would not be released to the fleet until it has a developmental testing completion certificate which is now expected to come in two phases for the F-35A and B - One in October for the full mission system, minus Aim-9X software, and another in November-December that adds the software version that supports Aim-9X.
Sorry that you were expecting a GIANT concurrency number but the GAO reporting on concurrency is for all to see and aviation and defense media have reported on it. You can see how those numbers changed over time and have now stabilized at or below the $2 Billion mark. Again, that $2 Billion is what the US services pay...actual cost to execute these changes is higher but industry shares the burden as described in the document above.
Second, the claimed costs for retrofitting the F-35 are a total lie. Who believes this aircraft's retrofit costs are $750,000?
A total lie. How the heck are you going to prove that? As you can see, the retrofit costs are on a curve. A downward sloping curve i.e. the earlier production lots required higher number of ECO's while the later production lots require fewer. This is common sense, as you get closer and closer to developmental testing completion you have less number of hardware discoveries that require retrofits. Those that you do find don't tend to be major so as to rake up a huge bill. You are obviously entitled to filing a FOIA request or taking the US Government to court if you believe it is all a lie. You could cite all your Sputnik articles in support of your argument.
Another point that I have mentioned, but you seemed to have not grasped is that these are US Concurrency costs i.e. it is the cost the JPO pays. It is not the total cost of concurrency. As the chart explains, they have a concurrency arrangement in place where they split concurrency costs with the contractors 50:50 (hence this is a hybrid arrangement as I had previously mentioned).
Total US Concurrency cost as reported by the GAO is iirc in the sub $2 Billion range (US cost with a cost sharing arrangement) which comes to less than 1% of the US acquisition cost. This may not be what you would like to hear but it is the case. Some may think $2 Billion is too much, and many would agree if put that way but then this is a $394 Billion acquisition program so $2 Billion is a tiny fraction of that especially when it is paid over 10 years. What you get in return is a high production rate and early fleet recapitalization and production stability.
And BTW, I'm sorry no one flies the jet back to Lockheed to get the changes. All Concurrency Changes are engineered at the depot. Same with the developmental cost or schedule. Lockheed does not develop the aircraft as in, they ask for a bill and timeframe at the end of which they hand over the keys. The aircraft is developed as part of an EMD/SDD program, lead by the government team that manages all contractor activity. It is not easy to estimate development cost over 10+ years for a high risk aerospace program. There are only a few recent examples where costs have been estimated with very high degree of accuracy. Hence, undertakings of this magnitude are always performed through a Cost Plus contracting mechanism where risk is shared by the customer given the uncertainties. The Government certainly did not go to Lockheed and asked them how much it would cost to develop. You are naive and honestly acting foolishly if you are trying to push through this argument. Most here are reasonably well versed with how large military projects work to know the difference and call BS on this much like your own version of 5th generation requirements that every known 5th generation design in the world fails to meet.
Its one of many lies told by LM stretching all the way back to the plane's development costs.
Lockheed does not report on or release concurrency cost date. It is the US Government that does so.