By Geoff Fein
After Sunday’s first flight of its Navy version of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), Lockheed Martin [LMT] has now flown all three variants and is preparing to begin delivering full missionized aircraft to the services in the coming year.
Additionally, Sunday’s flight marked the first for the production configured Pratt & Whitney [UTX] engine, which includes a number of improvements.
And, on Monday, the first mission systems-equipped F-35B (BF-4) short takeoff/vertical landing (STOVL) arrived at Naval Air Station (NAS) Patuxent River, Md., to begin testing.
“That will be the first mission system airplane formally entering into testing,” Tom Burbage, F-35 executive vice president and general manager for integration, told reporters during a conference call.
The first flight of the F-35C went just as planned, Jeff “Slim” Knowles, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 test pilot told reporters during a call earlier this week. “More so than any other test flight I have been on.
“We had planned and rehearsed it extensively over a number of weeks and months and it went exactly according to plan,” he said.
The first flight looked primarily at gear down handling to assess how the airplane flies in a landing configuration and to get an early look at how pilots were going to handle the fighter around an aircraft carrier, Knowles noted.
He also exercised the landing gear and hook and flew formations with a Navy F/A-18 to see how the F-35C handles in close formation. Knowles also ran some engine checks to make sure everything was working engine-wise, he added.
“There were no anomalies, everything went basically as advertised,” Knowles said. “It’s a very nice handling airplane. We put a lot of work into making this a nice handling airplane in the landing configuration specifically with the aircraft carrier in mind. It exceeded my expectations in terms of how it flew.”
Because of its unique aircraft carrier design, the F-35C flies at slower speed than other airplanes, he noted.
“It really jumped off the runway right away as soon as I started forward rotating,” Knowles said.
On landing approach, the F-35C was very stable and had a good roll response, he added.
“I am looking forward to doing some more flights with it and pushing it a little more and seeing how it handles.,” Knowles said. “My overall first impression…it was everything we would hope it would be.”
A key element of the F-35C is the ability to land safely, repeatedly, on an aircraft carrier, Knowles said.
“We put a lot of work into this airplane to be able to do that. You don’t have to spend a lot of training time worrying about just how to land the airplane,” he said. “You can spend time using all these unique systems that make up this fifth generation airplane.
“You combine those fifth generation avionics with the stealth, and stick it on a carrier that can go anywhere in the world, it’s really going to change the way naval aviation does business,” Knowles added.
In parallel to the flight testing, Lockheed Martin has also been conducting drop testing on a structural article, Burbage said.
“It’s an interesting series of tests. They take the airplane, elevate it off the ground, simulate landing speeds by spinning the tires, and drop the airplane to simulate the impact on a flight deck,” he said. “We are about 80 percent finished with that testing.”
To date, there have been no structural problems, Burbage. said.
He added Lockheed Martin will fly the test aircraft a number of times in the coming week before going through an extensive ground test validation phase before sending the fighter to NAS Pax River later this year.
“At steady state, our objective is to fly each test airplane a minimum of 12 flights per month,” Burbage added.
BF-4, the first F-35 to enter into formal testing, will be followed in a month by the first Air Force configured mission system airplane AF-3. It will undergo testing out at Edwards, AFB, Calif., he said.
CF-3, the first Navy mission system airplane, is scheduled to fly around the end of year, Burbage added.
“This mission systems aircraft adds a new dimension to the F-35 flight testing under way at Pax River,” Burbage said in a statement about the arrival of BF-4 at NAS Patuxent River yesterday. “Now, in addition to validating the aerodynamic capabilities and flying qualities of these jets, we will have the opportunity to confirm the performance of what we expect to be a transcendent avionics capability–the most capable ever in a fighter.”
A fifth F-35B, along with the first Navy carrier variant, is expected to join the fleet later this year at Patuxent River, according to Lockheed Martin.