Back the day an engineer cold be there at the start of program, see the maiden flight and even go on to see a second program. Today, the same engineer probalby enters years after the concept phase and retires before the first prototype takes of.

A friend of mine working on a space telescope had to fix a mistake that someone had made on a diagram. When she tried to figure out who made the oopsie, turns out he had worked on the project more than a decade ago and retired while she was in middle school

I think this is the quintessential scene from that movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA

The movie was based on a book of the same name written by Colonel James Burton, highly recommended. It is a history of how and why the kinds of scope creep occurred in the DoD procurement. Eerily prescient.

... and quietly avoids mentioning that a lot of the problem came from Burton, or that his proposals were found detrimental to the program.

He also was staunch supporter of replicating Volksjäger concept, which was fortunately laughed out of the room (even dumbest Soviet design at the time wasn't that dumb)

Wikipedia said it was started in 2006

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...

Lockheed and Boeing were building protoypes in the 1990s and the contract was awarded to Lockheed in October 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Strike_Fighter_program

thanks!