F-35 fleet hits 1 million flight hours; DOD reevaluating heavy reliance on private contractors

Yahoo

06-03-2025

Lockheed Martin announced Monday that the global F-35 fleet, the Department of Defense's most advanced fighter, has surpassed 1 million flight hours since beginning operation in 2011.
"Reaching 1 million flight hours is a monumental achievement for the F-35 program," Lt. Gen. Michael Schmidt, the F-35 Lightning II Joint Program Office executive officer, said in a prepared statement. "It highlights the unwavering dedication of our pilots, maintainers, industry partners and our international partners and foreign military sales customers."
For comparison, a Congressional Budget Office study reports that in 2023, manned aircraft across the entire Army flew for 770,000 hours.
The F-35 program has historically struggled with availability rates, as nearly half of the DOD's aircraft sit in maintenance bays, but program leaders are slowly reevaluating their heavy reliance on contractors to control supply chains and lower costs.
The DOD has three variants of the aircraft: the F-35A, operated by the Air Force; the F-35B, operated by the Marine Corps; and the F-35C, operated primarily by the Navy. Lockheed Martin is the prime F-35 contractor, with principal partners Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems.
The F-35 program has been connected to Hill Air Force Base early in the program. The 388th and Reserve 419th Fighter Wings were the Air Force's first combat-capable F-35A units.
The Ogden Air Logistics Complex, which provides logistics, support, maintenance and distribution for the F-35A, employs more than 8,100 military, civilian and contract personnel at Hill.
The 388th Wing at Hill was selected to fly the new F-35 Lightning II fighter in December 2013. The first arrived on base in September 2015. The base has received 78 F-35s, the last arriving in December 2019, before the wing declared "Full Warfighting Capability" with the aircraft in January 2020. All three of the Wing's squadrons have deployed into combat.
The "bread and butter" mission for these F-35s, according to 421st fighter squadron commander Lt. Col. Bryan Mussler, is offensive and defensive counter-air, escorting other assets and hunting down the enemy surface-to-air threats.
The 34th Fighter Squadron and Fighter Generation Squadron are currently deployed to Kadena Air Base in Japan. Northern Utah residents will likely hear the planes during night operations throughout March, finishing by 10:30 p.m. most days.
The number of F-35s grew from around 450 in 2022 (300 of those were F-35A's), to about 630 in April 2024, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), with a total of 2,500 planned by the mid-2040s.
The DOD plans to use the F-35, its "most ambitious and costly weapon system," through 2088, with projections of over $1.7 trillion on acquisition and sustainment, according to an April 2024 GAO report. $1.3 trillion of that is associated with the operation and sustainment.
Estimates show the Air Force expects to pay $6.6 million each year to operate and sustain each aircraft, well above the $4.1 million original target, though the target was adjusted in 2023 to $6.8 million. The cost to fly one of the planes is between $13,000 and $18,000 an hour, which comes out to between $13 and $18 billion over one million flight hours, more likely on the higher side based on the ratio of more expensive F-35A's in the fleet.
As fleets have grown, total flying hours have also grown, but the Congressional Budget Office reported in 2022 that the total flying hours for the F-35As were only about 2% greater in 2021 than they were in 2020, despite the number of aircraft increasing 21%.
All three fleets have flown fewer hours than the DOD's original benchmarks, and the program has struggled in the past with low availability of planes (about 55% in March 2023, the GAO reported in a series of audits.
In comparison, the F-35 fleets had higher availability rates than most of DOD's other fighters and attack aircraft, according to the GAO. However, the fleets are much newer than those other aircraft, so the rates can't easily be set side by side.
The GAO found the U.S. Government is heavily reliant on contractors like Lockheed Martin and had "limited decision-making ability and influence over depot maintenance" while facing a lack of technical data, spare parts, funding, support equipment and training.
The DOD is slowly working on completing recommended steps from those audits, but 30 out of 43 recommendations made since 2014 are yet to be implemented, the GAO reports. DOD officials are working on a major shift to transfer management of F-35 sustainment from the F-35 Joint Program Office to military services by October 2027, so the branches can better manage the mix of government and contractor roles.