Yet even as the program plows forward, unresolved technical issues have continued to emerge. That production milestone will be a symbolic turning point for the program, evidence that major problems that plagued the Joint Strike Fighter in the past are now history. Later this year or in early 2020, the F-35 will go into full-rate production, with Lockheed expected to churn out 130 to 160 or more planes per year, a huge step up from the 91 planes delivered in 2018. The Air Force used it for airstrikes in Iraq about six months later. In 2018, the F-35 completed its first combat operation for the Marine Corps in Afghanistan. Lockheed has now delivered more than 400 planes to American and foreign militaries, and the unit cost per aircraft has dropped significantly. Slowly, though, the program and its reputation have improved over the ensuing five years. It was one more bad news story for a controversial program that had been dogged by bad news. The F-35 never made it to Farnborough that year, and the public-relations coup that Pentagon and Lockheed officials had hoped for turned into another round of ammunition for the plane’s critics. Officials couldn’t guarantee that other F-35s wouldn’t have the same problem, and they didn’t want to risk a potentially catastrophic fire during a trans-Atlantic flight. “Heaven knows what could have happened then.”Īn investigation of the incident determined that a fan blade in the jet’s engine had overheated from friction and cracked, throwing off fragments of metal that punched through the fuselage, severed hydraulic and fuel lines and ignited a spray of jet fuel. “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. His first reaction was relief that it had been detected before takeoff, a stroke of good fortune that allowed the pilot to escape uninjured. And yet for years it seemed as if the F-35 might never make it beyond its development phase.Ĭhristopher 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.
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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. It’s also the United States military’s most ambitious international partnership, with eight other nations investing in the aircraft’s development.
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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. 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. 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. It was the first major mishap involving a F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. 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. 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. 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.