U.S. lifts F-35 grounding but skips British air show
FARNBOROUGH England (Reuters) - U.S. military officials have approved limited flights for Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighter jets, but the Pentagon said the newest U.S. combat jet would not make its international debut before potential buyers this week.
The F-35, the world's most expensive weapons project with a price tag of about $400 billion, has been grounded since the massive failure of a Pratt & Whitney engine on a U.S. Air Force F-35 plane at a Florida air base on June 23.
Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby said on Tuesday U.S. Air Force and Navy officials had granted the radar-evading jet a limited flight clearance that required engine inspections and carried restrictions on its flights.
Later in the day, Kirby told reporters the jet would not make a much anticipated debut at the Farnborough air show.
"I can confirm that the Department of Defense in concert with our partners in the UK has decided not to send Marine Corps and UK F-35B aircraft across the Atlantic to participate in the Farnborough air show," Kirby said.
"While we're disappointed that we're not going to be able to participate in the air show, we remain fully committed to the program itself and look forward to future opportunities to showcase its capabilities to allies and to partners."
The jet's failure to appear at a big military air show in Britain last week as well as its absence from the Farnborough event in southern England have been a blow for U.S. officials and their international partners, who were hoping to showcase the capabilities of the new multi-role fighter.
Global orders for the F-35 are expected to exceed 3,000, with Italy, Turkey, Canada and Australia among the U.S. allies planning to purchase the plane. "It's a black eye and a PR nightmare, but it's not going to change the outcome," said aerospace analyst Richard Aboulafia with the Virginia-based Teal Group.
He said the jet's absence from the British show, which began on Monday, was unlikely to affect buying decisions by foreign military forces but could prompt Canada and Denmark to opt for a competition instead of an outright F-35 purchase.
Lockheed's reaction was muted.
?While we were looking forward to the F-35 demonstration at Farnborough, we understand and support the DoD and UK Ministry of Defense's decision," spokeswoman Laura Siebert said.
SAFETY IS PRIORITY
Kirby said that restrictions on the plane's return to flight included limiting its speed to 0.9 Mach and 18 degrees of angle of attack. The front fan section of each engine must be inspected after three hours of flight time.
"That was a pretty significant limitation in terms of being able to fly them across the Atlantic," he said.
The decision was sure to disappoint top executives from the biggest contractors involved in the F-35 program, who had traveled to Britain for the plane's foreign debut. Billboards all over London had heralded the F-35's grand debut for months.
The planes had been slated to follow a route relatively close to the U.S. and Canadian coast, up past Greenland before heading to Europe, rather than a direct flight across the Atlantic Ocean, according to sources familiar with the plans. The decision to lift the grounding order was made at a high-level meeting on Monday and reflected growing evidence the engine failure was a one-off event and not due to a systemic or fundamental design flaw, sources familiar with the matter said.
Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall told reporters on Monday that no similar problems had been found on any of the other 98 engines in service and underscored that the program was still in the development stage, when technical problems are meant to be found and fixed.
Pratt President Paul Adams told Reuters in an interview at the air show that the F135 engine failure and a separate incident in May involving its CSeries commercial engine were unrelated and did not point to a larger problem.
Adams, who took over as president in January, said it had been a "challenging few weeks", but that both engines were still going through the developmental stage aimed at flushing out problems and resolving them.
(Additional reporting by Missy Ryan in Washington; Editing by Mark Potter and Jane Baird)