In very first operational deployment overseas, the U.S. Navy’s new F-35C fifth generation fighters embarked on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson for operations in the Western Pacific region have shown signs of significant corrosion and rust. Coming at a very early stage in the service lives of the new airframes, and as the Navy’s budget for maintenance had grown increasingly strained, this has raised serious questions regarding the service’s ability to operate the complex and very high maintenance aircraft effectively particularly as they begin to enter service in larger numbers. The F-35C entered service from 2019 following multiple years of delays, and currently has a limited initial operating capability with over 800 performance issues have prevented it from being viable for medium or high intensity combat until they are resolved. The fighters notably have significantly higher maintenance requirements than those they are replacing, the F-18E Super Hornets, with their radar absorbent coatings being particularly difficult to maintain and susceptible to corrosion at sea. Signs of rust on the airframes indicates that the fighters’ mosts prized feature advantaging them over the Super Hornets, their stealth capabilities, are likely to be seriously undermined.
Pictures of F-35Cs on the USS Carl Vinson show brown streaks and blotches across their centre fuselage and covering most of their upper surfaces. This comes as a number of U.S. Navy assets have shown similar concerning signs of poor maintenance and resulting rust, including all manner of surface ships as well as the service’s new Zumwalt Class stealth destroyers which like the F-35s are the product of a very troubled and much delayed program. Although the F-35C is the first stealth fighter deployed for conventional landings from supercarriers, it is notable that the F-35B vertical landing capable fighters deployed from light carriers previously showed no comparable signs of decay despite long deployments by both the U.S. Navy and the British Royal Navy. The F-35B entered service five years before the C variant in 2014, but like the more recent model has not been approved for full scale production by the Pentagon as it is still considered far from fully operational. As the U.S. Navy’s budgets are set to only grow more strained, with maintenance infrastructure and shipyards decaying and growing signs of an inability to control the rust on a range of assets, it remains to be seen whether the F-35C fleet will see its situation improve or worsen in the coming years. The Navy and Marine Corps are expected to receive close to 350 of the fighters between them, although the possibility of cuts in favour of both unmanned aircraft and less complex F-18E Super Hornets has been raised multiple times.