It baffles me on why other nations are buying the F-35.
I just hope Russian & Chinese generation 5 fighters are as crappy as ours.
https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2022/03/f-35-program-stagnated…
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program appears to be in a state of suspended development, with little progress made in 2021 toward improving its lackluster performance. The latest report by the Pentagon’s Director, Operational Test & Evaluation (DOT&E) reveals stagnation and even backsliding in some fleet reliability measures.
And that’s just the public DOT&E report.
In an unprecedented move, DOT&E is concealing many of the key details of the F-35’s poor performance. For the first time ever, the testing office created a non-public “controlled unclassified information” version of its report
Despite more than 20 years and approximately $62.5 billion spent so far on research and development alone, program officials still haven’t been able to deliver an aircraft that can fly as often as needed or to demonstrate its ability to perform in combat, which places military personnel in jeopardy. Most of the important details can only be found in the non-public version of the report, but some key findings are available in the public version:
The F-35’s availability rates “plateaued” over most of 2021 and then declined in the final months of the year.
Program leaders abandoned the efforts to complete the troubled Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) and instead decided to build a new network called Operational Data Integrated Network (ODIN). The new system, meant to anticipate maintenance problems and track parts and repair processes, runs faster and is more deployable than ALIS but is already behind schedule and has some of the same cyber vulnerabilities.
The Joint Simulation Environment, meant to be a high-fidelity and fully validated and verified simulator to test the F-35’s high-end capabilities, is now more than four years behind schedule. A full-production decision can’t be made until the planned 64 tests in the simulation can be completed.
The F-35 program’s modernization effort, an effort to complete the delivery of capabilities that should have been included under the original development contract, is behind schedule and has done little to reduce the high number of unresolved design flaws.