Pratt & Whitney is suspending its deliveries of new F-35 engines, following a setback on a Texas runway last month. Video from the December 15 incident shows a Lockheed F-35B Lightning II crashing during a quality check and the pilot ejecting.
Defense News first reported that Lockheed Martin had “announced it halted acceptance flights and deliveries of new F-35 Joint Strike Fighters” due to the ongoing investigation. As a result, Lockheed Martin delivered seven fewer aircraft than the 148 that they were contracted to deliver in 2022. According to that report, “A source familiar with the program told Defense News the investigation into the Dec. 15 mishap found that a tube used to transfer high-pressure fuel in the fighter’s F135 engine, made by Pratt & Whitney, had failed.”
Pratt & Whitney, which is a subsidiary of Raytheon, and earlier in December received a $115 million contract from the Department of Defense for an F135 engine enhancement program, told Defense News that they would not comment since an investigation into the crash was ongoing.
Problems relating to the F-35’s engines are nothing new. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report from April 2022 revealed that Pratt & Whitney delivered only six of 152 F-35 engines on time in 2021, “primarily due to quality issues that required resolution before engines could be accepted by the government.” And yet, through last year, Congress continued to fund the F-35 beyond the Pentagon’s requests. As Nick Cleveland-Stout noted in RS last year, the FY 2020 Defense Appropriations Act allocated funds for 22 more F-35s than DoD had asked for.
The F-35 aircraft additionally has been mired in other major problems. Dan Grazier wrote for RS in March that a non-public 2021 Pentagon’s Director, Operational Test & Evaluation testing report “showed that engineers are still trying to correct 845 design flaws. Their challenge is compounded by the fact that new problems are discovered almost as fast as the known flaws are fixed.”
Beyond consistent quality issues, the F-35 is also among the most expensive Pentagon programs ever. As a letter signed by a transpartisan group of organizations — including the Quincy Institute — last summer exclaimed, “Over the service life of the fleet, the F-35 program is projected to cost the American people $1.7 trillion. This is roughly $5,000 for every man, woman, and child in the nation.”
In the more than 20 years since Lockheed Martin won the competition to develop the F-35, more than $62.5 billion has been spent on the program’s research and development, according to Grazier. “Despite all that time and resources, the F-35 remains an underdeveloped aircraft,” he writes, “it will still take years to complete the design during a process program officials have dubbed ‘modernization’ but is really a second chance to finish work that should have been completed during the initial development effort.”
The latest mishap involving these engines caused the F-35 Joint Program Office to pause deliveries on December 27, and to ground a number of F-35s. It is unclear at this time how many aircraft were grounded or how long the groundings will last.
Quality check: passed. This one is the same quality as the rest.
One of the contributing factors to Nazi Germany's defeat in WW2 was an over-reliance on complicated war machinery that was too unreliable and too expensive to replace, such as the Tiger tank and Me 262 jet fighter
And the V2 rocket. And the various nerve gases. Obsession with wunderwaffen is the fascist panic response.
It's ok, they just released a thing that said they will be able to attach lasers to F-22's which will make them unstoppable somehow.
They could attach lasers to so many other things that would be more stable and less liable to crash. Like, I don't know, a fucking truck.
The USAF kinda hates the F-22 though, they see it as a dead end
The F-35 is not nearly as bad but also has problem with having to replace stealth coating after every flight or so. Without the coating their stealth profile would be significantly compromised.
The B-2 has the same issue, which is why they still lean on the B-1 and B-52. The B-21 will probably be similar.
RIPiss fuckers (I wish)
I heard that mathematically modeling aerospace junk is really taxing; like you gotta do finite element methods which are very computational (as opposed to theoretical), nonlinear, and there’s definitely thousands of degrees of freedom. Materials science makes a big deal, since the solid structures have certain ways they bend under certain stresses, shit like that
And that’s just to figure out how the thing behaves in response to stimuli (your control signals, plus inertia and air and gravity and other shit outside your control). You still need to figure out theoretical control schemes to get it to do what you want
Then you gotta have all the shit wired up and properly assembled, lots and lots of testing/opportunities for beheading…
Sound like the US is a bunch of losers that don’t deserve the latest and greatest death machines
Sucks to suck, but not for me
Boots stanning for that very expensive jankmachine were all over :reddit-logo: for years defending its honor and good name. I wonder what their excuses are now, or if it's just rehashes of boot jargon about "the mission." :bootlicker:
there are people praising star citizen, why wouldnt these people continue to uphold the honor of the f35?
You may have a point. The overlap between boots and people that crave some "United Empire of Earth" and completely missed the point of Verhoven's Starship Troopers movie is significant.
Critical support to Lockheed Martin employees working on the F-35 project who haven't strengthened American imperialism one single iota through their job.
I kinda wonder if one reason that the US is entering the Ukraine situation in a passive aggressive manner has to do with how shite their main aircraft are.
