The USAF Has To Re-Paint Its Trucks Because The F-35 Can’t Fly On Warm Fuel

[pauldun170]

AFAIK The issue with the F-35 is that it uses the fuel as part of the cooling system for some of the onboard systems (weight savings). So if the fuel is too warm while they are running through procedures on the tarmac they end up with subsystems shutting down to prevent over-heating.

There is a lot of fancy tech in this thing for what they have tried to shoe horn into this thing I'm not surprised.
F-16A kinda of sucked. The Mig29A was garbage. The F-4's initial shortcoming were well known. Once they iron out the bugs it will do just fine.

 

[pauldun170]

I think the bigger problem with F-35 and the F-22 is that the manufacturers are pushing the old soviet style maintenance model on the military.
Instead of having these planes serviceable by aircrews, they are pushing for yank and replace type set up where private industry does the actual repair.
Basically makes aircraft availability a slave to supply chain more so than it already is.


Something funky with the ecm modules? Ship it to depot A and wait for return part. Engine has weird vibration? Yank and ship it off to depot b.

 

[trenchfoot]

I think the bigger problem with F-35 and the F-22 is that the manufacturers are pushing the old soviet style maintenance model on the military.
Instead of having these planes serviceable by aircrews, they are pushing for yank and replace type set up where private industry does the actual repair.
Basically makes aircraft availability a slave to supply chain more so than it already is.


Something funky with the ecm modules? Ship it to depot A and wait for return part. Engine has weird vibration? Yank and ship it off to depot b.

I saw that happening way back when the Air Guard unit I retired out of transitioned from F-4's to F-15's. Avionics were more modular, I started seeing more tech reps and manf. specialists in our hangars working on the 15's more often. Now that the 22's are fully in place, big changes took place at the 199th and 154th, some good some bad, although I really liked the new facilities that got built to service the 22's.

But yeah, even though modular design allow for quicker "repairs" and sortie turnarounds, that's a lot of spares to be lugging around when forward deployed and I'm pretty sure FedEx and UPS don't provide ramp delivery service in the TO.

But what hasn't changed is that panels are still a PITA to R&R. Well, even worse now that coatings hide the screws and have to be dug out and re-coated after the panels get re-mounted. I can't think of a worse thing to do, besides removing stuck, stripped or broken screws on a bird that's supposed to have left with the sortie that just took off.