Pictured: Staff Sgt. Sean Carnes Worldwide
US General Schmidt admitted that less than 30% of the total number of F-35 aircraft in service with the US armed forces are capable of carrying out their tasks. Taking into account that the US military has approximately 540 F-35 aircraft in service, states can currently operate only 160 aircraft.
The American fighter F – 35, which in the United States positioned itself as a super “stealth aircraft”, in fact turned out to be neither so technologically advanced nor so successful. So, in 2022, the plane found a problem in the operation of the emergency evacuation system. That is, the pilot of an already defective or shot down fighter will not be able to leave the cockpit in a number of cases, which will significantly reduce survivability.
F – 35 in the modification “Lightning 2” in total, according to estimates by American experts, had about 940 critical errors. What can we say if the aforementioned ejection problem was solved within 10 days, and all this time American pilots were flying incompletely serviceable aircraft, which could cost lives even in peacetime.
During all this time, the American armed forces lost a large number of their aircraft, despite the fact that they did not even take part in the hostilities. Thus, only 46 F – 35 were lost due to problems with the power plant. This is far from the first time that the US military has lost 35 versions of aircraft due to defects in the aircraft itself, reports Svobodnaya Pressa.
The first case occurred in 2014, when the cheapest version of the F35A burned down at the airport due to a fire at a power plant. Two years later, for an identical cause, another “thirty-fifth” burned down. In 2019, the US military lost another F-35, this time due to an unsuccessful flight that led to the crash. And such cases are numerous. And since the cheapest version of the F35 is valued at more than $83 million, the damage to the US armed forces reaches a considerable amount.
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