Britain's Royal Air Force will receive the first of its long- awaited C-130J transport aircraft from Lockheed Martin [LMT] within a few weeks, pending the completion of a final series of icing tests, according to a senior executive.

"We should be done in about one to two weeks," James "Micky" Blackwell, the president and chief operating officer of Lockheed Martin's Aeronautics sector, told Defense Daily last week. "We've got a solution, the problem is finding natural ice so we can test, so we're looking at Alaska and Argentina, which may take a little while."

The plane was to have been delivered to Britain--the first C- 130J customer--last year, but several months ago Lockheed Martin engineers discovered icing problems on...