The company will perform engineering
work and other efforts relating to the
design and development of a new variant
of the aircraft, as part of the five-year
project, the department of defense said
monday.
According to the u.s department of
defense, the company will perform
engineering and related work over five
years to develop the new aircraft
variant.
Although the name of the us ally was not
disclosed in the announcement, defense
world reported that all F-35 customers
receive the standard variants except for Israel.
The majority of work on the new F-35
variant will be performed in Texas, with
some work performed in California, Florida, Maryland New York and the UK. F-35 modifications to meet local demands
are not unprecedented.
After all many
foreign F-35 customers request certain
changes to their aircraft, frequently
relating to weapons capabilities but
also other features like the drag chute
found on Norway's F-35A, and which has
also been selected by Finland, the most
recent joint strike fighter customer.
More radical changes are embodied in Israel's one-off test version of its F-35 iadir specially equipped to put the
types equipment through its paces
including aircraft and weapons trials, avionics integration, and airframe
modification and testing.
In particular the israeli test jet will
help with the introduction of Israeli
developed weapons destined for
operational F-35 is expected to include
the raphael spice precision guided bomb, but potentially also air-to-air missiles
and other weapons.
The operational F-35
is are also adding specific
communications and electronic warfare
systems, which will be tested locally
first. These jets are also distinct from
other F-35 as thanks to israel's ability
to install its own distinct mission
software and do so independent of the
autonomic logistics information system
which also handles plenty of critical
mission functions.
US Secretary of state Anthony Blinken
said that Washington was ready to move
forward with the sale, after conducting
some reviews to ensure Israel's
qualitative military edge.
Finland announced this month, that it has
chosen the F-35A for its next fighter
aircraft with plans to buy 64 F-35A after the F-35 JS F-1 Finland's HX Fighter Competition.
The Netherlands military declared on
monday initial operational capacity for
their F-35A fleet, making it the eighth
country and twelfth military service to
declare initial operational capability
for its F-35 fleet.
The F-35 is a fifth generation stealth
multi-role aircraft with the capability
to conduct six mission sets, strategic
attack, close air support, air superiority, electronic warfare, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance and
suppression enemy air defenses and
destruction enemy air defense.
Currently, 13 countries operate more than
700 F-35 stealth aircraft from about 27
bases worldwide. The US Military alone is
planning to purchase about 2,500 aircraft of types, with 1700 F-35 as
for the Air Force, 350 F-35B for the Marine Corps, and 270 F-35C and 70 F-35C for the navy and marine corps respectively.
Maintenance hours per flight hour are
low. The F-35 was designed to be more
maintainable than legacy fighters and it
is the air force variant requires far
fewer hours of maintenance per flight
hour than the F-15 or F-16.
In fact, the number of maintenance
hours per flight hour on legacy fighters
is a multiple of what F-35A is
demonstrating today. The air force's
stated requirement for F-35A is no more
than nine hours and the actual is five
hours, making it the most easily
maintained tactical aircraft in the air
force fleet.
F-35A outperforms other fighters in
speed of fixes, all fighters require
repairs especially if training missions
successfully mimic wartime conditions. A key metric of sustainability is whether
fighters in need of repair can be fixed
in a single eight-hour shift.
F-35A has
consistently outperformed all other air
force fighters in achieving this goal
thereby speeding return of aircraft to
the operational force. It is worth noting
that legacy fighters can often look more
maintainable than they actually are in
statistics, because their external pods
are detached and repaired separately
from the airframe and thus downtime is
not fully assessed to the aircraft, that
is not the case with F-35 where all
components are integrated internally
rather than being routinely removed for
repairs.
