How many?

[Dbag101]

2 days ago ( so I’m informed ) a USAF F35-A Lightning II crashed, during its approach to Eielson airforce base, in Alaska. The pilot ejected successfully. Martin Baker reckon this is the 7772nd life saved by their ejection seats, and the tenth, from an F35. The F35 hasn’t been in service very long, 10 ejections already, seems like a lot. Are the F35s a bit prone to crashing, in comparison to other aircraft? I’d be looking at the stats a bit carefully if I was anything to do with the procurement processes.

[IanH755]

There's over 1000 F-35's of various models currently flying with around 1,000,000 hours spent in the air and yet there's been just 10 crashes and 1 death.

For military single engine fast jet aviation, thats amazingly low, despite the amount of negative hype about everything "F-35" in the general zeitgeist.

Edited by IanH755 on Thursday 30th January 20:14

[havoc]

IanH755 said:

There's over 1000 F-35's of various models currently flying with around 1,000,000 hours spent in the air and yet there's been just 10 crashes and 1 death.

For military single engine fast jet aviation, thats amazingly low, despite the amount of negative hype about everything "F-35" in the general zeitgeist.

Just googled F16 for comparison (mass-market single-engine fighter):-

c.270 crashes in 17 million hours, so 1 crash every 70k hours, vs 1 crash every 100k hours for the F35 - a c.45% improvement, but that WILL include combat losses. Given the 40 years between the airframe designs, I'm not sure if that's good or not.

Struggling to find similar figures for the Harrier, but it appears to have faired notably worse than the F16, and particularly moreso in USMC ownership than in RAF ownership, allegedly because the USMC didn't really appreciate how unique it was and cut back on maintenance.


I think the real issue is that there is so much more information out there now than there was 20/30/40 years ago. And that the F35 has had its detractors from day-1 who will use anything to slam it. (Typical modern politics, quite frankly - throw mud in the safe knowledge that the facts will be largely lost in the resulting noise)