“The power system that starts and cools the aircraft failed during an engine ground test,” reports The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Besides starting the main engine, the failed system provides A/C to the pilot and generates back-up power. This isn’t the first (or second) time the F-35 has been grounded within the last year. A software glitch shelved the planes last October while an electrical issue put them out of service again this March.
The Joint F-35 Operations office that oversees has announced that the fleet will stay grounded until engineers get a handle on what’s causing the problem. It “is the prudent action to take at this time until the F-35 engineering, technical and system safety teams fully understand the cause of the incident,” the office said in a statement. And, with $US500 billion in potentital budget cuts looming for the Pentagon, the fate of the rest of the fleet, still waiting to be built, is sudddenly much less secure. [The Fort Worth Star-Telegram via The Atlantic Wire]
wsDK_II
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 11:55 AMahhhh america, fuck yea.
ErraticFocus
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 12:03 PMmaybe the pentagon should have hired stark instead of hammer industries…
EckyThump
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 12:23 PMI know..! Lets pour a shit load of money all over the bloody things!! #}
Aliasalpha
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 12:37 PMHeh so when they make F35 simulations & your computer bluescreens, its just being overly realistic
Craig
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 1:16 PMWhat a knob head commentary by A Tarantola. There’s no ‘fleet’ and its not in-service yet. So no you Andrew, you idjit, it’s not going to protect your airspace and smash your foes. It probably won’t for some time. Giz. Suggest you retire this fool and hire someone who has an inkling of what they are commenting on. Andrew is obviously outside his comfort zone and should not be left alone to mar the ‘integrity’ of Giz as a semi-decent source for tabloid tech journalism.
Mike
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 2:04 PMCraig, switch to decaf!
Nathan
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 2:18 PM@Craig
If you want the facts read the story, Giz is a tech blog, commentary linking to the stories, you read the story.
So from $4b for 100 of them to a princely 4x that at $16b for faulty, unreliable lemons.
Can we get a refund on the $300m development contribution we made that probably went to adding super sized cup holders into this thing.
If this was pink bats and school building the LNP would be going ape nuts over it. At least that money stayed mostly in Australia.
So yes we haven’t bought them yet but the policy to buy pipe dreams was just as flawed.
attila
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 2:49 PMAnd people said exactly the same thing about the F111 – even referring to them as the “flying opera house” (another project hit with massive delays and cost overruns)
Yet when it came to retire them, people were going on about how wonderful they are.
nodd77
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 4:06 PMmaybe you all need to get your facts straight we didnt buy these we arnt going to buy these we are buying the joint strike fighter which is a crap dummed down version of this plane it has a different engine different electrics and no weapons systems we have to add our own weapons later so if we ever do buy some i say waste of money big time but thats what our goverment loves wasting my tax dollars on shit
Wardski
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 9:53 PMDid I hear someone say “Collins Class Submarines”????
Quin
Monday, August 8, 2011 at 1:34 PMnodd77, you couldn’t be more wrong if you tried.
Dave
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 3:26 PMThese things are in pre-production testing? I’d be surprised, and worried if they didn’t have problems prior to being approved for full production.
Story is trash journalism full of inaccuracies. Don’t know why you even bothered.
Les
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 3:39 PMThe Pentagon doesn’t have to worry about being stuck with them. Our Government will buy them from them and pour millions into them to try and get them going and when they are working we will give them to Indonesia as a gift.
Ed
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 11:11 PMyou don’t actually know a thing about this topic. Indonesia is our IMMEDIATE enemy.
Edward
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 5:49 PMSigh…we could have gone to Mars and back
TSH
Monday, August 8, 2011 at 12:02 PMThis.
I’ll admit that I know little about military provisioning and what value we get for our tax dollars – but what I do know is that NASA does amazing things on a shoestring. If you’re gonna throw money at something, throw it at the agency that innovates new tech and inspires your people!
Jn
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 9:56 PMI do hope they opted for the extended warranty.
Ed
Friday, August 5, 2011 at 10:45 PMBasically none of you have much of an idea about how the ADF go about the acquisition of major products. We have ‘agreed’ to buy these airframes but not actually ‘bought’ a single one. We are a low echelon partner in this program, and have the least to lose. 300 million in a 1 Trillion dollar project is nothing. In defence terms this is nothing. We will end up getting the airframes at no ‘real’ loss to the taxpayer. The NSW government blew 100 million on a TICKET system for public transport that NEVER eventuated.
By the way, the Collins class Submarine did have some problems to start with but are now the most capable and well respected submarines on this planet, ask anyone who knows.
Quin
Monday, August 8, 2011 at 1:36 PMEd, you’re partly correct, but while we haven’t committed to buying all of them yet we are contracted to buy 14 already.
MotorMouth
Sunday, August 28, 2011 at 11:14 AMAll the negative comments here are nothing compared to the controversy that surrounded the F-111 in the 1960′s. If the F-35 turns out to be half as successful as that “fiasco”, it will serve us very well for many, many years. It might have been nice to get some F-22”s on the cheap but the US aren’t selling them, so this is what we will get.