F-35 “Franken-Bird” Being Made From Two Badly Damaged Jets

The Franken-bird is being assembled on the Ogden Air Logistics Complex (OALC) at Hill Air Force Base in Utah. The F-35 Joint Project Office (JPO) is main the venture in cooperation with a number of items throughout the OALC, in addition to Hill’s resident 388th Fighter Wing and the Joint Strike Fighter’s producer Lockheed Martin. The 388th is likely one of the Air Force’s major F-35 items.

“This is a first for the F-35 program and a very exciting project,” Dan Santos, F-35 JPO’s heavy upkeep supervisor, stated in an announcement in an official launch the Air Force put out concerning the Franken-bird venture yesterday.

The Air Force launch identifies the 2 donor airframes by their manufacturing numbers, AF-27 and AF-211. These plane are additionally identified by their Air Force serial numbers, 10-5015 and 17-5269.

AF-27 suffered a catastrophic engine fireplace at Eglin Air Force Base in 2014 that destroyed the rear two-thirds of the jet. The pilot was capable of escape the burning F-35A unhurt. Air Force investigators subsequently assessed the greenback worth of the harm to the plane to have been in extra of $50 million. Portions of AF-27 have been subsequently refurbished to the purpose the place they may very well be used as an Air Battle Damage and Repair (ABDR) coach for maintainers at Hill.

In June 2020, AF-211 misplaced its nostril touchdown gear whereas touchdown at Hill after a routine coaching sortie. The Air Force stated on the time that “the pilot egressed the plane and is present process a routine medical analysis.” To date, an official report on the precise circumstances surrounding that incident doesn’t seem to have been publicly launched.

The War Zone has reached out to the F-35 JPO for extra details about the June 2020 mishap and extra particulars concerning the Franken-bird effort.

Though the total extent of the harm to AF-211 stays unclear, the venture underway now definitely factors to it having been extreme. The two major parts of the Franken-bird being constructed now embody the rear two-thirds of AF-211’s airframe and the nostril part from AF-27, which was left largely unscathed by the 2014 fireplace.

“All of the [F-35] plane sections could be de-mated and re-mated theoretically, nevertheless it’s simply by no means been completed earlier than,” Scott Taylor, a lead mechanical engineer with Lockheed Martin concerned within the venture, stated in an announcement. “This is the primary F-35 ‘Frankin-bird’ to this point.”

Studies into the feasibility of mixing parts of a couple of broken F-35 airframe to type a whole plane really started in January 2020 earlier than AF-211’s nostril gear mishap. “The F-35 JPO reached out to us as a result of we had already achieved the actually massive harm restoration tasks for the F-22,” Lockheed Martin’s Taylor stated.

The Air Force says the Franken-bird venture additionally leverages expertise garnered from different previous F-35-related upkeep efforts. This contains the institution of a first-of-its-kind F-35 maintainer coaching facility at Hill using salvaged components and the partial restoration of one other broken Strike Fighter for use as an ABDR trainer final yr.

“However, not like earlier tasks, …. this initiative stands out because of its meticulous documentation, which will likely be used to determine standardized F-35 procedures that may be seamlessly built-in into routine operations sooner or later,” in line with the Air Force. “To full the work on web site at Hill, totally new, distinctive specialised tooling, fixtures, and tools have been designed and constructed.”

Major repairs to any trendy army plane generally is a complicated proposition. Potential points are much more pronounced in terms of stealthy designs just like the F-35. Stealth plane are constructed to particularly excessive tolerances and require many elements, even issues as small as individual fasteners, to be made and put in with equally excessive levels of precision.

Deliveries of recent Joint Strike Fighters have been paused prior to now over issues as seemingly minor as holes being drilled to the mistaken specs. Especially in terms of the radar-evading skins on plane just like the F-35, gaps and seams aren’t simply ugly, they will have severely destructive impacts on the jet’s stealthy capabilities. Linking up two giant sections from separate F-35s right into a single is just not as simple as simply bolting them collectively.

“We are doing this for the first time, and organizationally for the future, we are creating a process we can move forward with,” Dave Myers, the F-35 JPO Lightning Support Team lead engineer, said about the Franken-bird effort.

“Not only will this project return a combat asset back to the warfighter, but it opens the door for repairing future mishap aircraft using tooling, equipment, techniques, and knowledge that has been developed,” Santos, the F-35 JPO’s heavy upkeep supervisor, added.

As a part of the method of fusing AF-27 and AF-211 collectively, there was an effort to attempt to make the required tools to carry out this sort of work extra deployable. “We’ve designed versatile tooling that fits neatly into a Conex box [shipping container], making it transportable to various locations, including forward operation areas,” in line with Lockheed Martin’s Taylor.

It is value noting that this isn’t the primary time the U.S. army has grafted collectively current plane to type new ones for varied causes. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, the U.S. Navy obtained three two-seat F-5F “Franken-Tiger” adversary jets that Northrop Grumman created by combining elements from F-5Fs the service had readily available with elements from ex-Swiss Air Force single-seat F-5Es.

Examples of sewing parts of 1 complicated weapon system onto one other transcend plane, as nicely. After the Navy’s Los Angeles class attack submarine USS San Francisco bumped into an underwater seamount in 2005, it was finally returned to service as one thing of a “franken-boat” with a ‘new’ bow part taken from the decommissioned USS Honolulu, as you may learn extra about right here.

Foreign militaries have carried out comparable restore efforts, too. The Finnish Air Force for a time had a two-seat “Franken Hornet” that had been created by mixing sections from a badly broken single-seat F-18C with ones from an ex-Royal Canadian Air Force two-seat CF-18B. That plane was destroyed for good in a crash in 2010.

Still, the total extent of the advantages that will come from the proof-of-concept F-35A Franken-bird restore effort stays to be seen. It’s additionally not clear how possible it might actually be to do that stage of labor at ahead areas within the subject. Stealth plane have traditionally required vital logistical and sustainment footprints because of the aforementioned nature of their development.

There are additionally time and cost questions. It is unclear precisely when work really began to create this ‘new-ish’ F-35A, however the Air Force has made clear that does not anticipate the jet to be prepared till March of 2025. This can be stated to be months forward of the unique schedule.

This is consistent with how lengthy it has taken severely broken F-22s to get flying once more. It took practically seven years for the Raptor that ended up on its stomach at Tyndall to return to service and the one which went skidding down the runway at Fallon took some 5 years to get again within the air.

Of course, the F-22 has lengthy been out of manufacturing and solely a small variety of these stealth fighters have been ever produced, which considerably complicates even basic upkeep. Even if it prices $35 million to get the Franken-bird again within the air, that’s lower than the overall worth of the harm to AF-27. It can be lower than half the value of shopping for a brand new F-35A, which is presently round $80 million based on publicly available data.

Improved and expanded procedures to restore or repurpose broken F-35s may additionally simply be helpful within the context of the broader challenges of sustaining U.S. Joint Strike Fighter fleets. Earlier this yr, The War Zone printed a deep dive into how F-35 spare half shortages and adjoining elements have created a scenario that might dangerously hamper the power of those plane to conduct sustained fight operations in any future large-scale battle.

In September, Lockheed Martin disclosed that plans to implement a new performance-based logistics model to attempt to assist mitigate a few of these points had slipped into 2024. The objective had been to finalize a contract with the U.S. army on this regard earlier than the top of the yr.

When it involves the Franken-bird, going by means of the method in any respect factors to how helpful every F-35 is and that the thought of mixing two broken examples to create an operational one has relevance. Case in level, the stitched-together plane that will likely be giving a second lifetime of kinds to each AF-27 and AF-211.