F-35: Hangar Queen
by David Archibald
20 June 2025
Five days ago, a Royal Navy F-35B, the vertical take-off variant, couldn’t land on its carrier off the southern coast of India and so diverted to Trivandrum Airport in Kerala. It is still there, being guarded by airport security:
Presumably the carrier can’t leave the area until this aircraft is recovered. Another critic of the F-35, who wrote a book about it entitled Trillion Dollar Trainwreck, said of this motionless F-35:
This is why all the “road base” F-35 demos are touch-and-go or at best don’t involve engine shutdown. The jet has a huge appetite for unique ground equipment and there’s none of that less than 5000 miles away.
Early in the Trump second term there was concern that the F-35 might have a ‘kill switch’ which would enable the U.S. to stop military activity it didn’t approve of. The U.S. doesn’t need that sort of backdoor switch. Like newborn lambs, the F-35 will use any excuse to die. That is why, when it is away from its home base, there is an emphasis on hot-pitting in which they don’t turn the engine off while refuelling — because there is a good chance that it won’t start again.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, a number of countries opted to buy the F-35 rather than the far better fighter aircraft they could have chosen instead. This wasn’t a sign of higher intelligence; all those countries believe in global warming and are thrashing their economies with Net Zero. One of these countries, Denmark, has now been threatened by the U.S. over Greenland.
Lockheed had expected the F-35 to be killed off in 2015, but the program was kept alive by General Dunford, Commandant of the United States Marine Corp, who declared Initial Operating Capability for the F-35B variant while it was still a bag of bolts. For this venal act of betrayal of his own troops, Dunford was rewarded a seat on the Lockheed board four months and eleven days after he retired from military service.
A few more years passed and one Frank Kendall, appointed by the Biden regime to be Secretary of the Air Force, used delaying tactics to keep the F-35 program going. The U.S. Air Force, alarmed by the hollowing out of its fighter force, had progressed what became the F-47 over a number of years and, it seems, had chosen the Boeing offering two years ago. Instead of going into production, Kendall called for a review of what was needed in fighter attributes on the modern battlefield. That review affirmed that the F-47 is what is needed. Kendall then bought another nine months of life for the F-35 program by declaring that he would leave the decision to the next president. He had also done what he could to suppress F-15EX production because each F-15EX that rolled off Boeing production would mean one less F-35 being built.
The U.S. Air Force has now announced that its order for F-35s in the 2026 fiscal year has been reduced from 48 to 24. They simply can’t afford to operate it. It was supposed to cost no more than an F-15 at US$25,000 per hour of flight, but ended up at twice at that. So the air force cut the flying hours for pilots, who were then supposed to develop their flying skills on simulators.
The same would be true of the RAAF, which reduced the number of F-35s it wanted from the initial 100 to the 72 already delivered. Nobody has bothered to ask the RAAF why they did this or asked F-35 pilots what they thought of the aircraft. In the last election the Liberal Party said that they would, if elected, restore the RAAF F-35 fleet to the original order of 100. That intention told the Australian public that the Liberal Party knew nothing about defence and were not even mildly curious about it. That is also true of anyone else promoting the F-35 non-solution.
Another fun fact about the F-35: the software running the aircraft tends to crash in flight and needs to be rebooted mid-flight. You can imagine how the pilots feel about that.
Mark Twain said that history doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme. Actually, the F-35 is a close repeat of another Lockheed aircraft, the F-104 Starfighter, which first flew in 1954. To minimise drag, the F-104 had small wings, which in turn meant it had poor handling characteristics. If the wings had been 25% larger, it might have been a good aircraft.
Similarly, the wings of the F-35 were made as small as possible so that the B variant was light enough to take off vertically. Consequently, one pilot has said of the F-35 that it “flies like a rock with tiny wings”. The nickname of the F-35 in the US Air Force is ‘Fat Amy’; in other words, it is a wallowing, useless thing that is mostly harmless. An inquiry on AI tells us that U.S. Air Force pilots had started using the Fat Amy nickname by 2015 (at the latest). These pilots didn’t have any choice in the matter. They had to fly what their venal betters had chosen for them. But would any country expect to be protected by something nicknamed Fat Amy? The fact that many countries chose the F-35 after 2015 speaks volumes about their laziness and lack of curiosity.
There are other parallels. Of the 2,578 F-104s built, the U.S. Air Force took only 296 of them. Germany took 916 F-104s, of which 292 crashed, taking the lives of 116 pilots. The German Government had been bribed with at least US$10 million by Lockheed in 1961. Bribes were also used to generate sales to Italy, Japan, the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia.
Regarding the F-35s in Israeli service, Israel is given US$3 billion worth per annum of U.S. weapons annually, and Egypt US$1.3 billion worth, under the Camp David Accords. The Israelis had wanted F-15s instead but had no choice in the matter. They had to take F-35s and make the best of it.
The F-35 has been all slaps and giggles for Australia so far but things will become very serious. The U.S. Air Force will send their F-35s to the boneyard as soon as they can. They have secured extra budget allocations to ramp up F-47 and F-15EX production. Each extra aircraft coming off those production lines means another F-35 will be going into early retirement. The U.S. Navy might have first call on any F-47s built beyond the Air Force’s needs. We will be at the mercy of Lockheed Martin for the supply of parts for our F-35s. It will be a living death, as Lockheed will be merciless.
As to the alternatives, there is now an eight-year wait list on the French Rafale. Nobody is serious about getting the Typhoon within a decade, because the Europeans will have first call on production capacity. The solution will be what it has always been — the Gripen E from Sweden. The fuselage hardpoints on the Gripen E can take the weight of the PrSM Increment 2 missile and so would be good to go for the role of sinking Chinese ships at a great distance from the Australian mainland.
With respect to reviews of the supply of U.S. nuclear submarines under AUKUS, the appropriate line from popular culture is “Well babies, don’t you panic!” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The U.S. has several levels of motivation for supplying us with these exquisite vessels. Firstly, there is distributed deterrence. This is the reason that half a dozen European countries have stocks of nuclear bombs from the U.S. inventory. It complicates Russian war planning. Having nuclear submarines based in Australia complicates Chinese war planning; it also provides an excuse for U.S. submarines to operate out of Australia.
It is true that currently the U.S. industrial base can’t even supply their own needs in submarines. But in the latter years of the Cold War, the U.S. was building four nuclear submarines a year and could so again if they chose to do so. Similarly, the cost and delays in submarine refits in the U.S. is simply due to mismanagement, which is a choice. And they could choose to do better by replacing some U.S. Navy personnel. The U.S. sees the supply of nuclear submarines to Australia as a great start to selling them to other countries as well, with the benefit of providing critical mass and continuity to their nuclear submarine building.
As to the choice of nuclear submarines as a weapon, we are a land girt by sea, as our anthem says. It is appropriate to have a navy. If you are going to have a navy, submarines are a better choice than surface ships, which today are just targets for submarines, aircraft, weaponised jetskis, coastal missile batteries and other ships. In your choice of submarines, nuclear submarines are more cost-effective than diesel-powered submarines. When the Soviet Union fell apart and Russia had a limited naval budget, they kept their submarines going and gave up on their surface fleet. The U.S. Virginia class submarines we will be supplied with from 2032 are the best thing we could have hoped for. That timeline:
David Archibald is the author of American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare