The U.S. military discovered a problem with the
ejection seats used across its F-35 Joint Strike Fighter fleet in April, but
waited three months to ground those aircraft flown by the Air Force, Navy and
Marine Corps to fully investigate the issue.
An ongoing investigation sourced the issue to the production line, prompting waves of temporary stand-downs this week. “During a routine maintenance inspection at Hill, Air Force Base, Utah, in April ‘22, an issue was discovered with one of the seat cartridge actuated devices in the F-35 seat,” Steve Roberts, a spokesperson for seat manufacturer Martin Baker, said Friday. Cartridges are the ejection seat component that explode to propel an aviator out of the cockpit and prompts their parachute to open. The defective part was loose and missing the magnesium powder used to ignite the propellant that shoots someone to safety, Roberts said.
The military tested 2,700 F-35 ejection seat cartridges and discovered three failures as of Wednesday, the briefing summary said. Service officials declined to confirm or deny the summary’s narrative of events. Roberts said the problem was unique to a particular cartridge number and to the F-35, but did not answer how many defective parts have turned up so far. Air Combat Command spokesperson Alexi Worley confirmed that the first faulty cartridge was found during a routine inspection in April. The military immediately inspected additional aircraft, she said, and halted its investigation when Martin-Baker discovered a quality-assurance failure on its production line.
The F-35 Joint Program Office then issued a “routine” directive, known as a time compliance technical order, that mandated inspection of all ejection seat cartridges within 90 days starting July 19. Each plane can return to regular flights once it passes inspection. Though Air Combat Command owns most of the Air Force’s more than 300 F-35As, some are managed by other major commands like U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Pacific Air Forces. The Navy and Marine Corps have also stopped flying F-35B and F-35C jets while investigations are ongoing. Each aircraft will be inspected before its next flight rather than in batches over three months.
The issue “only affects aircraft equipped with
[cartridge actuated devices] within a limited range of lot numbers,” the
service said in a statement. The Air Force temporarily stood down its T-38
Talon and T-6 Texan II training aircraft due to the same ejection seat worries.
Most were slated to returned to service, “Our primary concern is the safety of our
airmen and it is imperative that they have confidence in our equipment,”
Nineteenth Air Force boss Maj. Gen. Craig Wills, who runs an organization
responsible for the service’s training enterprise, told Air Force Times in an
emailed statement.
Several aircraft fleets across the Defense
Department that use Martin-Baker ejection seats from the T-38s and T-6s to the
Navy’s F/A-18 Hornet and F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets, are on hold while
the military digs into the problem. The issue may also affect European
airframes like the Eurofighter Typhoon and Dassault Rafale and aircraft flown
by Turkey and South Korea. The U.K. Royal Air Force also stopped
“non-essential” flights for its Red Arrows jets and Typhoon warplanes over
safety concerns with its ejection seats, the Daily Mail reported.
F-35 Joint Strike Fighters are the Pentagon’s premier fighter jet flown by the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, plus more than a dozen foreign countries that have ordered or received them. In April, the Government Accountability Office reported it will cost more than $1.7 trillion for the Pentagon to buy, operate and maintain the jets in the U.S. Lockheed Martin plans to build more than 3,000 F-35s for militaries around the globe. More than 800 planes have been delivered so far over the past 15 years, over half of which belong to the U.S.
Comments
Post a Comment