Revealing the Maintenance Nightmare of Stealth Fighters

The F-35As have critical failures every 11 flight hours and airframe-only (excluding engines and systems) maintenance is 4.4 man-hours per flight hour.

The US air force is trying to fly its F35s from 250-316 hours each year. This would mean 1100-1400 hours each year on airframe maintenance and more hours on engines and systems. Each F-35 stealth fighter has over 25 critical failures every year.

The US military targets annual flights hours of
250 hours for F-35As;
300 hours for F-35Bs; and
316 hours for F-35Cs.

The F-16 had 29.5 flight hours between critical failures. The F16 needs 17 hours of maintenance for every hour of flight. It needs regular inspections, repairs, and replacements to ensure that it remains safe and reliable in the air.

The US has the most experience dealing with the maintenance nightmare of stealth fighters and stealth bombers. China and Russia are just starting to deal with this problem that is common to all advanced planes but especially stealth planes.

Chinese and Russian fighter planes have inferior engines. Chinese and Russian fighters have even more maintenance problems.

Newer Russian aircraft are designed for 3,500–4,500 flight hours, with some as high as 6,000. Soviet-era aircraft were designed for 2,000–3,500 hours. The standard service life of a US fighter jet is about 8,000 flying hours. Chinese fighter planes are copies of Russian planes. China tries to use its own engines. Chinese engines have shorter operating lives than Russian airplane engines.

Russia’s air forces number of flight hours are closer to 75% or 50%, or between 70 and 120 hours, of what is considered the normal rate for NATO nations.

The Russian and Chinese maintenance numbers are more secret but it seems that US planes and US stealth planes are able to fly twice as much as Russian and Chinese planes. Russia and China are starting their first stealth planes. They will need to learn to overcome the huge maintenance nightmare that the US has been managing for the past 30-40 years.