The first Lockheed Martin (LM) F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) has now been grounded for more than six months. But program officials hope to get the world’s largest combat aircraft program airborne again by the end of this month. “We have a very aggressive flight test schedule to get everything done by October 2012,” Bill Coutts, LM’s F-35 site director, told AIN at Fort Worth recently.
On the 19th test flight of aircraft AA-1 in early May, when it flew to near-40,000 feet for the first time, the right horizontal tail actuator failed. LM test pilot Jeff Knowles was able to recover safely, as back-up systems worked. The F-35 uses a unique electro-hydrostatic actuation system, provided by Moog Inc. But the fault turned out to be a relatively simple matter of arcing in the electronics controller, a condition that had not been apparent during prior altitude chamber testing.
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