The Times devotes its front page, and a large number of articles inside, trashing the UK F-35B programme today. Behind a paywall, but I include the last to give a taste. Looks like someone in the MOD wants to wield a large axe.
Britain spends billions on flawed fighter jets
Jets are overbudget, unreliable and vulnerable to cyberattacks.
Upgrades and extras push up flyaway costs
If this were a car...... you wouldn't buy it
F-35: Behind the story
Malfunctioning £309,000 helmet left pilot floundering in darkness
The glossy promotional video for the F-35 fighter jet’s £309,000 helmet promises flawless night vision, maximum comfort and a unique 360-degree perspective that lets pilots “see” through the plane. Actual footage of the Generation III helmet display from an exercise shows the reality: a pilot putting himself in danger because the night vision malfunctioned. The test pilot tried to land on an aircraft carrier at night — the same manoeuvre expected of British pilots when they test-fly the jets from the first of two carriers next year.
The night-vision helmet display during the carrier landing approach
“He’s looking down at the right, trying to establish where he is,” Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Fields, the exercise evaluator, notes in a video of the exercise. “His words after [he landed]: ‘Control, you are going to have to give me a compelling reason to do that again.’ ”
Nick Bartlett, a flying qualities engineer, said that as soon as the pilot took off he knew “this is not good. It was almost like a fog for him. At that point I became uncomfortable.” Erik Gutekunst, a colleague, said: “Any time I start talking about it I get heebie-jeebies. It became very clear that the picture he was working with was unsatisfactory for doing any sort of operation within the vicinity of the ship.” Lieutenant-Colonel Fields summed it up. “We got lucky. There’s no way around it.”
Until recently, the F-35’s helmet was so heavy that lighter pilots were banned from wearing it in case they broke their necks on ejection. A “lite” version required the cockpit to be redesigned to have somewhere to put a spare visor, a report for the Pentagon noted.
Other problems are more serious. Gun strafing symbols, which line up targets for the pilot, were “currently operationally unusable and potentially unsafe”, according to the December 2016 report. The night-vision technology was less accurate than in older aircraft, making identification of targets “more difficult if not impossible”. “Green glow” — a leakage of light around the edge of the display — was improved from previous models but was “still a concern”.
In 2015 a separate report into a dogfight test between an F-35 and an older F-15 aircraft noted that the pilot’s helmet kept smacking into the canopy when he tried to turn around. “The helmet was too large . . . to adequately see behind the aircraft,” the report said.
The helmet is still in development, and many bugs will be ironed out. But countries including Britain are purchasing the F-35 today, meaning that they could face higher bills to upgrade the helmet as solutions are discovered.
Planes too heavy to land
Of all the problems faced by the F-35 Lightning fighter-bomber, being too heavy might prove one of the most costly (Alexi Mostrous writes).
Buried in a US defence report is a passage that will worry taxpayers handing over about £150 million per jet. A key performance requirement for the F-35B is that it can use thrusters “to safely conduct a vertical landing” — on land or on aircraft carriers. The report found that when early versions were upgraded, they would be over the weight permitted for a safe landing. Britain bought four of the 14 aircraft affected, records suggest. The report estimates further upgrades, to bring the aircraft up to its full potential, would push it over an even stricter “structural limit”. Without the upgrade the aircraft will miss out on future software and hardware updates. This could mean that Britain paid millions of pounds for redundant aircraft.......
