F-35 crash Albuquerque

[Zaphod58]

Link
Link
Link
Link


I can only go on what I heard and read. I can not quote air hours and logged accidents. Those stats sound very good.

However, I heard from the early days, pilots were afraid of this plane.  I’ve read about a myriad of issues. Above is a small sample but I’ve read many, many more.

I’m glad acknowledge you know more but you statement of fact above belies this is a plane that has, from its beginning until today, had serious flaws.

yes I’ve read glowing articles too, but in the back of my mind is pilots afraid of this aircraft.

Your first link is utter bullshit.  The Air Force admitted no such thing.  What they ACTUALLY said is that they were looking at another aircraft type to do some missions, because, as General Brown said, "You don't drive your Ferrari every day to go to the supermarket".  The Air Force doesn't need to use F-35s to bomb a bunch of Toyota trucks driving the the desert, with zero air defense.  That's what F-15s and F-16s are for.

As for the mission capable rates, they are on par with just about everything else in the Air Force inventory.  The F-35 couldn't legally set up a supply chain and depot system until Milestone C was declared, which happened in January. That means that they were ordering small batches of parts as needed, and setting up small local supply chains.  This means that the repair process has fallen significantly behind, because they're waiting on parts and the supply chain to be set up.  Give it a couple of years to build the supply chain and get the parts supply set up, and the mission capable rates will continue to go up.  In February, the mission capable rate was over 64%.  In FY21, the mission capable rate for the year was 68.80%.  The majority of the fighter fleet was between 60-70%.  There were six aircraft in the USAF that were over 80% for the year.

The second article is five years old.  A lot has changed since then, including a software update.  There's another software update being tested right now with yet another around the corner, bringing the aircraft to Block 4.

The third article again comes back to lack of supply chain, and old data.  The data was reported in September of 2023, using numbers from March.  By Feb, approximately a year after those numbers were compiled, the mission capable rate was back up to over 60% for the fleet, and has since passed 64%.  Most of the metrics required are being surpassed by the aircraft. 

The last link is a guy that works for Project On Government Oversight.  POGO is the biggest joke in the industry, and will inflate minor things into serious issues.  Dan Grazier was a Marine Corps tank crewmember when he was active duty.  How exactly does a tank guy know cybersecurity stuff for an aircraft that he never worked on? That's like an auto mechanic telling you that your rocket isn't going to fly because a computer gave a bad reading for half a second.

Pilots were never afraid of the F-35.  They WERE afraid of the F-22 and some other aircraft, but the F-35 has never had the serious problems that they had with the oxygen system.