Program officials are blaming an electrical fault aboard one of the Air Force A-model birds that has caused the grounding for all test jets while they gather information and investigate. Luckily for the program and the pilot, the power failure occurred on the ground before takeoff.
The government and contractor progam officials’ response.
The government and contractor engineering teams are reviewing the data from the incident to determine the root cause of the failure. Implementing a precautionary suspension of operations is the prudent action to take at this time until the F-35 engineering, technical and system safety teams fully understand the cause of the incident. Once the facts are understood, a determination will be made when to lift the suspension and begin ground and flight operations of the 20 F-35s currently in flying status. These aircraft are part of the System Development and Demonstration (SDD) and Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP) fleet.
Determinations of root cause and potential mitigating actions have the highest priority of the F-35 Team. Impact to SDD execution and production operations is being assessed. The program has built schedule margin into the test schedule to accommodate these kinds of incidents that occur in a development effort. Periodic updates concerning this situation will be released as warranted.
This is another setback for a highly criticized program. A program that has gone over budget and failed to meet several deadlines. As mentioned at many other sites, the recent grounding makes America’s fifth-generation fighters essentially expensive parking lot monuments.
The fleet of F-35s join 187 F-22’s purchased by the Air Force through Lockheed Martin have been out of operation since they were first acquired in 2005. Those planes, worth a total of $77.4 billion, have remained out of use since they were first added to the Military’s arsenal. In May, however, malfunctions in the oxygen system installed in the crafts caused the Air Force to indefinitely ground the fleet, this time with actual reason.
Aside from training and patrol operations, the nearly $80 billion worth of F-22s have never been used by the US Military, despite the country’s engagement in several wars.