The Pentagon\u2019s chief weapons tester said the next-generation F-35 jet continues to fall short of full combat readiness targets and, despite some progress on reliability issues, all three versions of the fighter are breaking down \u201cmore often than planned.\u201d<\/p>\nNone of the Air Force, Marines and Navy variants of the Lockheed Martin Corp. fighter are meeting their five key \u201creliability or maintainability metrics,\u201d Robert Behler, the Pentagon\u2019s director of operational testing, said in prepared remarks Wednesday before two House Armed Services Committee panels.<\/p>\n
\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n
\u201cThe operational suitability of the F-35 fleet remains at a level below service expectations,\u201d Behler said in the prepared remarks. \u201cIn short, for all variants, aircraft are breaking down more often than planned and taking longer to fix.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n
Even with that 2020 target approaching, analysis to date shows that neither the Marine Corps nor Navy F-35 models are currently \u201con track\u201d to meet their reliability metrics even as they log more hours, according to the latest assessment.<\/p>\n
Among the key lagging metrics cited by Behler are \u201cmean flight hours between critical failure\u201d — a data point that refers to the time between failures that result in the loss of capability to perform a mission-critical task, or mean time between part removals for replacement from the supply chain.<\/p>\n
Significantly, while the F-35 fleet demonstrated, over short periods, \u201chigh mission capability\u201d rates reflecting the percentage of time jets are safe to fly and able to perform at least one specific mission, the jets \u201clagged\u201d by \u201ca large margin\u201d the more complete measure of \u201cFull Mission Capable\u201d status, he wrote.<\/p>\n
That indicates \u201clow readiness\u201d for combat missions \u201cthat require operationally capable aircraft,\u201d Behler said. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Something is seriously wrong with our whole weapons procurement and development process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the selling points of the F-35 is that it supposed to be significantly more reliable than legacy aircraft. Not so much: The Pentagon\u2019s chief weapons tester said the next-generation F-35 jet continues to fall short of full combat readiness targets and, despite some progress on reliability issues, all three versions of the fighter …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[384,381,588,379],"class_list":["post-177236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-aviation","tag-defense-procurement","tag-fail","tag-military"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177236"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}