The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Is Still a Huge Mess
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Buried inside 48 pages of highly technical language is a gripping story of mismanagement, delayed tests, serious safety issues, a software nightmare and maintenance problems crippling half the fleet at any given time
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Some of the technical challenges facing the program will take years to correct and, as a result, the F-35’s operationally demonstrated suitability for combat will not be known until 2022
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Tests of the F-35’s ability to fire and drop the majority of its planned weapons in a combat-realistic operating environment won’t actually begin until the Block 3F configuration in 2021. Accomplishing those will require a total of 50 test events
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DOT&E believes these more complicated test events “cannot be accomplished within the remaining time planned by the Program Office to complete Block 3F flight test” in May 2017.
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The program currently has a five- percent discovery rate for simpler developmental testing. This means that for every 100 tests, five new problems are discovered. These new discoveries then have to be fixed and tested again, which is a costly and time-consuming process
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testing of the fixes — “include the ejection seat for safe separation, wing fuel tank over-pressurization and the life-limitations of the F-35B bulkhead.”
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The F-35 has had significant trouble with uncommanded “wing drop.” This means flaws in the aircraft’s aerodynamics under heavy maneuvering loads cause the aircraft to occasionally make sudden, uncommanded movements in the air.
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During one test flight of an F-35C — the U.S. Navy’s JSF model — excessive buffeting “adversely affected performance in defensive maneuvering where precise control of bank angles and altitude must be maintained while the F-35C is in a defensive position and the pilot is monitoring an offensive aircraft.”
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Buffeting and the reduced maneuverability caused by the associated control law software “fixes” featured prominently in the now famous example of the F-35 losing 17 dogfights to a 35-year-old, heavily-laden F-16
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In an attempt to find a less compromising buffet fix, spoilers were fitted to test F-35s. These spoilers somewhat reduce the separation of airflow from the wing to lessen the shaking of the airplane during heavy maneuvering, and test pilots have reported some improvement in the buffeting as a result.
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October 2015 after it emerged that he had grounded pilots weighing fewer than 136 pounds because mannequin tests showed that the ejection seat would kill them — and that no mannequin testing at all had been done for pilots weighing 137 to 244 pounds.
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The ALIS software went through four different versions in 2015 — ALIS 1.0.3, ALIS 2.0.0, ALIS 2.0.1, and ALIS 2.0.1.1. While evaluating the software, personnel identified two Category I deficiencies and 56 Category II deficiencies in ALIS 1.0.3. One of the Category I deficiencies, for example, could prevent aircraft from taking off.
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These false positive health reports are not rare. Field reports say that 80 percent of ALIS-reported problems turn out to be false. This places a massive extra burden on the F-35’s already over-worked maintenance force.
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Pentagon officials have already acknowledged the F-35 program suffered a major breach when a foreign power, presumably China, hacked into an unclassified F-35 contractor computer network and stole massive technical data files.
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The program office validated the strong need for F-35 cyber testing in the reasoning they gave for cancelling it. The computer glitch that allows ALIS to ground an aircraft would be an obvious target for an enemy cyber warrior.
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Operation Steel Knight is an annual event for the Marine Corps. Detailed planning for it begins at least six months before the first units move out to the field. Maintenance crews had months to prepare the necessary aircraft to support this exercise and they still barely managed to get the planes to fly once every three days. A future enemy will likely not be so considerate as to provide advanced notice.
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But DOT&E found that significant combat deficiencies remain. “If used in combat, the Block 2B F-35 will need support from command and control elements to avoid threats, assist in target acquisition, and control weapons employment for the limited weapons carriage available (i.e., two bombs, two air-to-air missiles).”
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The same problem preventing F-35s from taking off in a lightning storm also prevents them from performing hard maneuvers with full fuel tanks. Fully fueled F-35’s are limited to only three Gs because harder maneuvering could increase the pressure in the siphon tanks beyond their limits.
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The cost to implement retrofits and the purchase price of planes made obsolete because they never are fixed add up to the program’s “concurrency tax.” With several years of development and testing still to come, the amount of this tax will continue to spiral ever upwards.
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The DOT&E report makes perfectly clear that any further F-35 production at this point is unwise. The plane has yet to prove itself capable of performing even the basic combat tasks used to originally sell the program to the American people.
http://warisboring.com/articles/the-f-35-j...ll-a-huge-mess/ 
Military Thread V20 
Mar 10 2016, 05:12 AM
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