Here's what the new DOTE, Robert Behler, says about the F-35 Joint Strike fighter in his office's latest annual report:
The operational suitability of the F-35 fleet remains below requirements and is dependent on work-arounds that would not meet Service expectations in combat situations. Over the previous year, most suitability metrics have remained nearly the same, or have moved only within narrow bands which are insufficient to characterize a change in performance.
Overall fleet-wide monthly availability rates remain around 50 percent, a condition that has existed with no significant improvement since October 2014, despite the increasing number of new aircraft. One notable trend is an increase in the percentage of the fleet that cannot fly while awaiting replacement parts – indicated by the Not Mission Capable due to Supply rate.
Reliability growth has stagnated. It is unlikely that the program will achieve the JSF ORD (Operational Requirements Document) threshold requirements at maturity for the majority of reliability metrics. Most notably, the program is not likely to achieve the Mean Flight Hours Between Critical Failures threshold without redesigning aircraft components.
"The U.S. Reprogramming Laboratory (USRL) continues to operate with cumbersome software tools and outdated or incomplete hardware. The lab began creating Block 3F mission data files (MDFs) in the summer of 2017, and it will take 12 to 15 months to deliver a fully-verified mission data load (MDL), made up of a compilation of MDFs, for IOT&E." This is the F-35's threat library, with which Breaking D readers are very familiar.
The ALIS logistics and planning system remains vulnerable to cyber attacks, Behler writes. They and the threat to the system are so bad "the F-35 program and Services should conduct testing of aircraft operations without access to ALIS for extended periods of time." Behler says the plane can operate up to 30 days at a time without hooking up to ALIS. We hear the program is doing all it can to plug the cyber vulnerabilities. While there is certainly an endless cycle of threat, fix, new threat, fix etc, ALIS has been identified as an important cyber vulnerability for the F-35 for years and the program must do something to alter this cycle.
The heaviest of the three aircraft, the F-35B, didn't only shake apart under stress-testing more quickly than the other two aircraft, but, as the DOTE notes, "The program has struggled to find a tire for the F-35B that is strong enough for conventional high-speed landings, soft enough to cushion vertical landings, and still light enough for the existing aircraft structure. Average F-35B tire life is below 10 landings, well below the requirement for 25 conventional full-stop landings. The program is still working this problem, which will not be resolved within SDD."
The air refueling probe "tips are breaking too often, resulting in squadrons imposing restrictions on air refueling. The program is still investigating this problem." I hear that the program is focusing on improved maintenance for the hose reel mechanism, as well as design changes to the probe.
There's another important problem which will make it very difficult for the Air Force to argue that it can replace the A-10 with the F-35A, as planned: "The F-35A gun has been consistently missing ground targets during strafe testing; the program is still troubleshooting the problems." The gun shoots "long, and to the right." The Marine's F-35B and the Navy's F-35C guns, which are not built in, are apparently performing better. "Initial accuracy testing of the F-35B and F-35C poded guns showed better results than that of the F-35A model," Behler writes. "Both the F-35B and the F-35C gun pods exhibited the same right aiming bias as the F-35A, however the long bias is not manifested in the podded gun systems."