DOD tester’s report: F-35 is still a lemon

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The most recent report on the development of the United States Defense Department’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is due out soon from the Workplace of the Secretary of Defense’s director for functional test and examination (DOT&E), Robert Behler.

In 2015’s report was full of problem. And based upon Bloomberg Federal government’s Tony Capaccio’s early access to the brand-new report, we understand much of that problem is still problem. The only real great news is that there are no brand-new significant defects in the $428 billion airplane program reported by Behler’s team.

However the bad is still bad. For beginners, the Air Force version of the F-35 can’t strike what it shoots its weapon at.

There are a overall of 13 Classification 1 “must fix” concerns still unsettled with the F-35 that stand in between the program and final production. And even as the long list of less crucial issues is attended to, brand-new ones keep appearing. “Although the program office is working to fix deficiencies,” Behler composed in the report seen by Bloomberg, “new discoveries are still being made, resulting in only a minor decrease in the overall number.” And “many significant” concerns stay to be attended to, he kept in mind.

The report does not consist of information from the existing round of combat screening, so even more issues might soon be added to the list.

ALIS does not live here any longer

Among the significant sources of issues with the F-35 program is the Autonomic Logistics Details System (ALIS)– the software application that drives upkeep and logistics for each F-35 airplane. ALIS is expected to smartly drive the circulation of upkeep parts, guide assistance teams in scheduling upkeep, and ensure the best parts get stuck in the best locations. Airplane health and upkeep action details is sent out by the ALIS software application in each airplane out to the whole dispersed logistical assistance network.

However ALIS has actually had some issues– consisting of the truth that the software application was not total when Lockheed Martin started delivering airplane, and each group of the 490 airplane currently provided shown up with among 6 various variations of the software application. All of them will need comprehensive software application retrofits when the seventh is total, together with the other 510 approximately that are anticipated to have actually been provided around the world by that point.

There are still 873 particular issues in ALIS and other F-35 software application (below 917 in 2018).

And those have actually been a factor to the F-35 fleet’s bad dependability. According to OT&E, the general fleet of F-35 s fell far except being 80-percent “mission capable”– indicating that they might be utilized in a minimum of one kind of combat objective. The Navy’s F-35 C fleet “suffered from a particularly poor” mission-capable rate, the OT&E team specified.

In addition to simply practical software application issues, the OT&E workplace likewise reported that cybersecurity concerns that had actually been determined in previous reports on the F-35 program had still not been fixed.

Do you even shoot, brother

While the Navy and Marine Corps variations of the F-35 might have more schedule issues than the fairly less-complex Air Force F-35 A, they can do a minimum of something much better: strike what they’re contending.

The F-35 B and F-35 C have actually externally installed weapons, while the Air Force’s 25- millimeter cannon is installed internally. Issues with the positioning of the weapon’s install, and the truth that the install periodically fractures after the weapon has actually fired, have actually made the precision of the weapon “unacceptable,” according to test authorities, and have actually made the Air Force limit usage of the weapon. While the F-35 program workplace has actually dealt with enhancements of the weapon install for the F-35 A, these have actually not yet been checked.

However none of this is truly decreasing acquisition of the F-35– now the most costly DOD weapons program inhistory Thinking about that the F-35 was initially expected to be the “low” in the “high-low mix”– with the F-22 being the more capable airplane– the big expense overruns and defects make the F-35 look significantly like the world’s most costly lemon.