Software flaws will delay combat testing on F-35s by a year

Tests to determine how Lockheed Martin’s F-35 will perform in combat won’t begin until at least August 2018, a year later than planned, and more than 500 of the fighter jets may be built before the assessment is complete, according to the Pentagon’s test office.

“These aircraft will require a still-to-be-determined list of modifications” to be fully capable, Michel Gilmore, the U.S. Defense Department’s top weapons tester, said in his annual report on major programs. “However, these modifications may be unaffordable for the services as they consider the cost of upgrading these early lots of aircraft while the program continues to increase production rates in a fiscally constrained environment.”

Gilmore said the delay in testing stems from flaws in the “3F” software that gives the F-35 its full combat capability. Testing of the software isn’t likely to be completed until at least January 2018, or 15 months behind the October 2016 date set when the program was reorganized in 2012, he said. The F-35 is a flying computer, with more than 8 million lines of software code.

Joe DellaVedova, spokesman for the Pentagon’s F-35 office, said in an e-mail that the program “continues to aggressively execute development and testing of Block 3F capabilities with the objective of delivering” them about mid-September 2017. He said the program office doesn’t intend to take any shortcuts.

The Defense Department plans a fleet of 2,443 F-35s for the U.S., plus hundreds more to be purchased by allies, including the U.K., Italy, Australia and Japan. The F-35 is being built at Lockheed’s aeronautics complex in west Fort Worth.

Even as Lockheed and the government have worked to address the plane’s many problems, “F-35 production rates have been allowed to steadily increase to large rates,” Gilmore said in his annual report to congressional defense committees.

The Pentagon wants to increase the number of F-35s purchased for the U.S. to 92 annually by 2020 from 38 last year. That number jumps to 120 a year when foreign sales are included. For this year, Congress added 11 aircraft to the 57 requested.

To meet the expected demand, Lockheed’s mile-long Fort Worth assembly plant is in the midst of a $1.2 billion reconfiguration. Lockheed expects to hire 1,000 additional employees for its assembly line alone starting this year. As of last fall, Lockheed Martin employed about 13,000 people in Fort Worth, with 8,800 assigned to the F-35 program.

Combat testing, which takes at least a year, puts all the pieces together to stress the aircraft in realistic war-fighting scenarios — such as how well a four-jet formation detects and shares data about sophisticated Russian or Chinese air defenses during realistic mock missions.

This story was originally published January 29, 2016 at 11:28 AM with the headline "Software flaws will delay combat testing on F-35s by a year."