The military would dedicate more Lockheed Martin-made F-35 Joint Strike Fighters to testing recent technologies and capabilities under the House’s proposed fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act.
An amendment proposed by Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va., and adopted by a voice vote Wednesday would increase the variety of developmental test F-35s within the works from six to a minimum of nine, tweaking a provision that was passed as a part of the FY24 NDAA.
Wittman’s amendment to the annual defense policy bill would also require those test F-35s to return from the 18th lot of jets. That will be earlier than the schedule within the FY24 NDAA, which had its six test F-35s coming from the nineteenth lot.
Wittman’s amendment would also give the military more flexibility to make a decision which F-35 variants — the Air Force’s conventional takeoff-and-landing F-35A, the Marine Corps’ short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing F-35B, and the Navy and Marine Corps’ F-35C that may land on carriers — shall be used as developmental test jets.
The FY24 NDAA required the Pentagon use two of every variant as test jets, but the most recent proposal wouldn’t set any such requirements.
The House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday advanced the proposed $883.7 billion bill to the complete House after a 12-hour markup.
Wittman, who chairs the panel’s Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee, has ceaselessly spoken about what he considers a necessity to extend the variety of test F-35s to perfect upgrades, equivalent to Technology Refresh 3. The F-35 program is struggling to complete TR-3, its latest series of hardware and software improvements. The hassle is now roughly a yr behind.
TR-3 is facing software problems and delays within the production of key parts, and a Government Accountability Office report earlier this month said test officials reported the software stays unstable.
Since July, the Pentagon has refused to just accept deliveries of the most recent F-35s from Lockheed Martin over the TR-3 delays. An undisclosed variety of those jets are stored at Lockheed facilities, particularly its factory in Fort Value, Texas, but GAO warned in its May 16 report that the firm may start running out of room to park undelivered F-35s.
GAO also raised concerns in regards to the F-35′s program’s testing capability, which now has jets older than 4 many years that ceaselessly break.
4 more F-35s are to receive modifications and turn into test jets by 2026, but GAO said testers would wish to make use of workarounds and couldn’t conduct all of the external weapons tests some F-35s would wish.
The proposed FY25 NDAA would cut the Pentagon’s planned F-35 purchase by 10, redirecting the roughly billion dollars in savings to expanding the jets’ testing capability, including by buying more test aircraft.
Wittman told reporters this month, after the committee released its proposed bill, that the F-35 program’s testing capabilities sorely need improvement and are long overdue. He said failure to speculate in sufficient testing infrastructure has directly resulted in problems, equivalent to the TR-3 delays.
GAO also raised concerns in its report in regards to the timetable for bringing on recent developmental test F-35s. The six jets that were already within the works would have been unprepared to conduct test flights until 2029 on the earliest. And the plans to retire existing test F-35s, GAO said, would have left the F-35 program with no test jets in 2028 and a part of 2029.
Lockheed Martin said testing of the most recent version of TR-3 is underway and expects the jets will work well enough for deliveries to resume within the third quarter of 2024. But even when the military accepts delivery of those jets, they’d likely only have the ability to fly training missions and could be unprepared to fly combat operations until 2025.
Stephen Losey is the air warfare reporter for Defense News. He previously covered leadership and personnel issues at Air Force Times, and the Pentagon, special operations and air warfare at Military.com. He has traveled to the Middle East to cover U.S. Air Force operations.