F-35B grounded following fuel leak during takeoff

F-35B aircraft under evaluation were grounded Friday after a fuel line part failed and caused a Wednesday testing takeoff to be aborted.

The Pentagon’s official “red stripe” suspends flight operations until an engineering investigation is complete for the short take off and vertical landing version of the plane being developed to replace most Marine Corps aircraft.

According to information provided from NAVAIR by the military legislative adviser for Rep. Walter B. Jones, R-Farmville, “The takeoff was safely aborted with no secondary damage. Updates will be provided once further information is available or corrective action is established.”

A nozzle for the “fueldraulic line failure… resulted in a significant fuel leak during the takeoff roll of a UK-owned, Eglin-based F-35B.”

The email forwarding the advisory to area officials and community leaders interested in successful development the Joint Strike Fighters’ most complex version, was prefaced with “Bad news, but as all of you know, new aircraft are going to experience problems, e.g. V-22, Dream Liner, etc.”

Harry Blot, retired Marine Corps lieutenant general and a former program manager with Lockheed Martin’s JSF development, said, “I wish it hadn’t happened but it is the type of thing that comes as part of the analysis. It’s good that if something was going to break, nobody got hurt and the airplane wasn’t damaged.”

“The part is made by Rolls Royce under contract to Pratt and Whitney,” he said. “It is actually the tail pipe which rotates down to get the thrust you need for swivel operations. It failed. Now they have to figure out why. It just came out of maintenance. Was it something somebody did wrong or something wrong with the design or manufacture apt to recur? They have to sort it out.”

“NAVAIR is responsible for technical help for all of these aircraft and when they get an incident, they look at it and say ‘Stop flying the airplane until I get a chance to see what happened,’” Blot said. “It could be a one-of-a-kind incident and you go on. It could mean this has to be fixed. Some evaluations take less than a day. Others take much longer.”

“The F-35B has come off probation and right now is in the middle of the pack with the others,” he said, guessing there are about 20 F-35B’s built including those at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, three at Yuma, Ariz., and four or five at Patuxent River, Md.

Aircraft at Cherry Point air station are supposed to be replaced with mostly the F-35B variant of the Lightning II, but production of the aircraft in a contract with Lockheed was in 2001 is more than 70 percent over original budget, now at about $395.7 billion.

While Cherry Point is last on the list to receive F-35B squadrons with none expected to be based here before about 2022, the Navy aircraft rework facility Fleet Readiness Center East has been tapped to work on the planes. If development and procurement stays on track, one could arrive there for modification as early as 2014.

Source:   http://www.newbernsj.com