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The Pentagon is accelerating production of Lockheed Martin Corp.'s F-35 jet even though the planes already delivered are facing "significantly longer repair times" than planned because maintenance facilities are six years behind schedule, according to a draft audit.
The time to repair a part has averaged 172 days -- "twice the program's objective" -- the Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog agency, found. The shortages are "degrading readiness" because the fighter jets "were unable to fly about 22 percent of the time" from January through August for lack of needed parts.
[...] The F-35 program office and Lockheed have identified steps to increase parts availability "to prevent these challenges from worsening" as aircraft numbers increase, the GAO said, but Pentagon documentation indicates "the program's ability to speed up this time line is uncertain."
The GAO also disclosed that the F-35B -- the Marine Corps version of the fighter that's scheduled to begin ship deployments next year -- won't have required maintenance and repair capabilities at sea and "will likely experience degraded readiness."
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Sunday November 05 2017, @08:15PM (4 children)
By the way, I should add...
The explanation above also makes sense given the theory behind the F-22/F-35 pair. The F-22 was supposed to be the "real fighter" to take on the "serious enemies". The problem is, tens of billions of dollars for a weapon that is only useful in WWIII is not politically palatable. But the F-22 is still designated to fill the role you are looking at.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 05 2017, @08:21PM (3 children)
F-22 is not only super expensive, but can't be exported. So F-35 is cooked up to export to allied countries, but they tried to cram so much into it to make it high-tech swiss knife.
Hah. High-tech swiss knife/rifle/rocket launcher/nail polisher. Think about that.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Sunday November 05 2017, @08:30PM (2 children)
Sure. The real issue is that when cooking up this strategy, military planners assumed they had a much bigger budget available. A political miscalculation.
Had the plan proceeded as envisioned, the F-22 would be a decent weapon for the stated scenario. And they probably would have exported it to our most trusted allies, such as the UK, Australia, etc. As it is now, the plan has kinda gone to crap.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday November 05 2017, @08:55PM (1 child)
The F-22 utilizes the OBOGS, and it is well-known that even its own pilots didn't want to fly it.
I assume that if the problem was rectified, it was only by operating a more aggressive maintenance cycle.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Sunday November 05 2017, @11:04PM
Both planes certainly have overly complex onboard logic. I mean just look at the problems we DO know about, like the "crossing the dateline bug". The backup oxygen system sounds like it was a similar type of issue; the backup oxygen system was not designed to deploy even when the computer detected a failure of the main system.
Luckily the occurrence of these kinds of problems tends to decrease as time goes on with a given system, as bugs are found and fixed. And in the meantime, there are still older aircraft in reserve.