US faces more headaches with F-35 fighter

"Robair" said
We should hurry up and buy some so we can park them in the shop next to our subs.

"Gunnair" said
We should hurry up and buy some so we can park them in the shop next to our subs.

The US military's F-35 fighter program, already suffering repeated delays, faces a spate of technical problems that the Pentagon expects will slow the pace of production, officials said Wednesday.

The latest troubling revelations for the Joint Strike Fighter -- the most expensive weapons program in history -- emerged from a leaked internal Pentagon report that outlines an array of problems exposed by flight tests.

The internal report, posted Tuesday on the independent website Project on Government Oversight, listed five engineering problems "where major consequence issues have been identified" but not yet solved.

The weak points included the pilot's helmet mounted display which has performed poorly, a fuel dump system that leaves fuel on the plane's surface, the plane's integrated power system that has raised safety concerns, and the arresting hook landing gear for the aircraft carrier version of the plane. The hook has failed to work properly in test landings on carriers.

Three other engineering issues also carried the potential to turn into major problems, it said, including airframe fatigue and buffeting or vibration.

The report, dubbed a "Quick Look Review" of the F-35 program, said the technical challenges generated "a lack of confidence in the design stability" of the aircraft, which has already started production.

As a result, the review calls for "serious reconsideration of procurement and production planning," it said.

A spokesman for the Joint Strike Fighter program confirmed that managers were looking at scaling back the pace of production to allow time to fix the technical problems that had emerged.

"That's one way to help reduce concurrency (costs) is to slow that (production) down," spokesman Joe DellaVedova told AFP.