Big difference, though, is that the F-35 hasn't even started serious mass production. They're coming out in dribs and drabs from the factory; there's only about 300 of them across the board - far short of the 2600 for the Americans (let alone ROW), while production has been around 7 per month. That's expected to double soon, as the program pushes into higher build numbers with all the upgrades learned over the first batch of aircraft...but those first batches are going back to the factory for rebuilds up to the current standard soon.
It's the first full crash, but there've been a number of aircraft that suffered severe accidents (Class A Mishaps) with expensive rebuilds, most recently one that collapsed its nose gear on landing and tore up the nose of the aircraft. Granted, later aircraft shouldn't have these problems and overall numbers will go down, but the incident rate is concerning for as few aircraft as there are currently.
You ever work in manufacturing? your error rate on production goes
down with quantity. On the 777F (Freighter) the first two had to be sold at a drastic mark-down to Air France, because of how many mistakes were made during the post-certification phase of the program (that is, stuff we had to rebuild or re-work when they pulled the flight test gear out). That's with an established airframe using established technologies.
F-35 uses protoype-level technologies and a novel airframe utterly unlike anything else in production before hand,
of course low numbered airframes are going to have problems. and not just machine problems, but man problems too-there's really not enough for maintainers to have a
best practices in keeping the planes running properly-because they're new, they're low-number airframes, and the institutional and organizational culture and knowledge to get the best out of them
doesn't exist yet.
and "Yet" is the operative word.
Consider this; the F-111 A
was a death-trap with a 25% operational rate when USAF adopted it. Not 25% downtime, but 25%
operational until around 1973.
by the time it was retired by the USAF, it was a reliable airplane with advanced avionics and a reasonably effective role. By the time the Australians retired theirs (F models) they were actually fairly good airplanes.
Aviation mechanics can get damn near anything to fly-if they have a body of knowledge on that anything of sufficient depth-even planes that shouldn't, like an airframe with a 35% built in instability...
sure, there's been an accident, and anyone who's frequented this forum knows my opinion on the decision to
continue with the JSF programme as it's been executed. But the planes are built, they're flying, so now? Now it's a matter of volume times time, building up the knowledge-warehouse and organizational cultures necessary to keep the F-35 from being an expensive hangar queen.
and that only happens with Lessons Learned in service. no matter how sadistic your testing programme is, only operation in the
field can find the real flaws and provide the real data to provide real solutions. Reality is different from fiction, because reality doesn't have to warn you ahead of time.
