Has The F-35 Finally Moved Past Its Reputation Of Being An Overhyped And Underperforming Warplane?

Ten international partners and customers have committed to buying the jet, and eight of them have received their first F-35s.CreditAnne Rearick for The New York Times

Valerie Insinna, New York Times: Inside America’s Dysfunctional Trillion-Dollar Fighter-Jet Program

The F-35 was once the Pentagon’s high-profile problem child. Has it finally moved past its reputation of being an overhyped and underperforming warplane?

On the morning of June 23, 2014, an F-35 burst into flames just moments before its pilot was set to take off on a routine training mission. He heard a loud bang and felt the engine slow as warning indicators began flashing “fire” and other alerts signaled that systems in the plane were shutting down. Witnesses at Eglin Air Force Base near Pensacola, Fla., reported seeing the pilot escape from the cockpit and run away from the fighter jet, which was engulfed in thick plumes of black smoke. It was the first major mishap involving a F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and it couldn’t have happened at a worse time.

In less than a month, the F-35, America’s high-profile next-generation fighter jet, was poised to make its international debut in Britain at Farnborough Airshow, the second-largest event of its kind in the world. Officials from the Pentagon and the aircraft’s manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, had eagerly anticipated the opportunity to show off a working, flying F-35 after a decade of delays and spiraling cost overruns.

The F-35 initiative is the Defense Department’s most expensive weapons program ever, expected to cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion over its 60-year lifespan. It’s also the United States military’s most ambitious international partnership, with eight other nations investing in the aircraft’s development. Its advocates promised that the jet would be a game-changing force in the future of war — so much was riding on its success that a program cancellation was not an option. And yet for years it seemed as if the F-35 might never make it beyond its development phase.

Christopher Bogdan, the Air Force lieutenant general in charge of the program at the time of the fire, received a call about the incident within the hour. His first reaction was relief that it had been detected before takeoff, a stroke of good fortune that allowed the pilot to escape uninjured. “If that engine problem would have occurred 30 seconds, 60 seconds, two minutes later, that airplane would have been airborne,” Bogdan said in a recent interview. “Heaven knows what could have happened then.”

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WNU Editor: This New York Times post provides a good summary on the many problems that plague the F-35. Problems that regular readers of WNU have been well aware of for the past ten years.