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Pentagon

F-35 Still Struggling With Readiness Woes, DoD Tester Says

By Marc Selinger

Thursday, January 25th, 2018

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F-35 Still Struggling With Readiness Woes, DoD Tester Says

The Air Force's F-35A conventional variant. Photo: Air Force.

The U.S. Department of Defense’s new fleet of F-35 Lightning IIs is making little progress in overcoming its readiness problems, according to a new report by the Pentagon’s chief weapons tester.“Reliability growth has stagnated,“ Robert Behler, DoD’s director of operational test and evaluation (DOT&E), wrote in his fiscal year 2017 annual report. “Overall fleet-wide monthly availability rates remain around 50 percent, a condition that has existed with no significant improvement since October 2014, despite the increasing number of new aircraft.” A…

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