Peter Pae of the Los Angeles Times has an excellent piece on the production process for the Joint Strike Fighter, aka the F-35. Pae reports that Northrop Grumman plans to produce one complete JSF fuselage every day, with plans to produce as many as 5,000 aircraft if there is strong enough demand from the Pentagon and foreign governments. December saw a number of positive developments for the JSF program (which I wrote about here), particularly with regard to finding a large export market for the aircraft. Still, 5,000 seems a bit optimistic. John Pike of globalsecurity.org expressed his doubts about the program to Pae: