F-35 Will Fly Despite Auditor’s Fleet-Grounding Warning
By Patrick Tucker
April 17, 2016
Pentagon officials say the plane can fly without the aircraft’s enormously complex diagnostics system.
Problems with the Joint Strike Fighter’s logistics software will not keep the F-35 fleet from flying, the Pentagon says, contrary to a new Government Accountability Office, or GAO, report that hinted at a possible grounding.
In the April 14 report, GAO officials say problems with one of the jet fighter’s software suites are so severe that “it could take the entire F-35 fleet offline” if there was a failure, in part because there’s no backup to the system.