The F-35 in Europe: a New Way of Flying

Widespread acquisition of the Lockheed Martin F-35 across Europe is proving to be a transformational experience for the air forces adopting the type, Peter Felstead reports.

The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lighting II has swept through Europe to become the continent’s dominant fifth-generation combat air platform, securing sales not only with former operators of the Lockheed Martin F-16 but also former users of the Panavia Tornado and Boeing F/A-18 Hornet. As it has done so, the aircraft has changed how European air forces not only fly and fight, but also train, support and maintain their combat aircraft fleets.

An Expanding User Base

The United Kingdom was the first nation to join the F-35 programme and became a founding Tier 1 partner in 1995, giving the UK some degree of influence in the aircraft’s development. The UK had an original aspiration to buy 138 F-35B short take-off/vertical landing (STOVL) variants, although only 48 are currently on order. These are to be in service by 2025, by which time the UK government says it will have decided how many more F-35s it will buy. The UK declared initial operating capability (IOC) Land for its F-35Bs on 10 January 2019 and IOC Maritime in January 2021.

Italy and the Netherlands joined the programme as Tier 2 partners in 1998 and 2002 respectively. Italy has a programme of record (POR) for 60 F-35As and 30 F-35Bs, while the Netherlands has a POR for 52 F-35As. IOC with the F-35A was declared by the Italian Air Force in 2018, while the Royal Netherlands Air Force (RNLAF) declared IOC for its fleet of F-35As in December 2021.

Denmark, Norway and Turkey then joined the programme during its Concept Development Phase (although Turkey was subsequently ejected from the programme in 2019 due to Ankara’s procurement of the Russian S-400 air defence system). Denmark signed onto the F-35 programme in 2002 and has a POR for 27 F-35As, while Norway selected the F-35 in 2008 and has a POR for 52 F-35As. Denmark will achieve IOC status in 2024, while Norway declared IOC with the F-35 in 2019.

Belgium became the first European F-35 Foreign Military Sales customer in 2018, ordering 34 F-35As. This was followed by Poland in 2020 (with plans to procure 32 F-35As), Finland and Switzerland in 2021 (64 and 36 F-35As respectively), and the Czech Republic and Germany in 2022 (with plans to buy 24 and 35 F-35As respectively). In June 2022 Greece formally requested to buy 20 F-35s, with an option for 20 more. Ultimately, Lockheed Martin expects more than 550 F-35s to be operating in Europe by 2030, including US Air Force (USAF) squadrons operating out of RAF Lakenheath in the UK.

A New Way of Flying

For European air forces used to operating fourth-generation fighters, adoption of the F-35 has been something of a transformational experience.

“Every country that transitions from a fourth-gen to a fifth-gen fighter goes through a learning curve,” J R McDonald, Vice President of F-35 Business Development at Lockheed Martin, told ESD on 4 May 2023. “We did it when we transitioned from F-15s to F-22s. The initial reaction was ‘We’ll just look at the same tactics … and we’ll fly the airplane the same way. Very quickly we realised that you are not optimising this incredible platform with its sensors and its interoperability and its sensor fusion.

“So very, very quickly those tactics started changing dramatically. And now in the US we’ve been flying those tactics for quite a long time now,” said McDonald. “Something as basic as mutual support, wingmen flying together: there’s no reason to be a hundred yards apart in these airplanes when you have complete situational awareness of where the other airplane is, so maybe 20 miles apart is the best way to employ the airplane rather than visual mutual support, which is where we did it with a fourth-gen airplane.”

Rich Woods, F-35 Lead Instructor Pilot for BAE Systems at RAF Marham, additionally noted the F-35’s two key fifth-generation attributes in a conversation between company representatives and ESD on 5 May 2023: sensor fusion and stealth. “Predominantly aircraft detect other aircraft via their radars,” he explained. “Now if you have an aircraft which has a low radar cross-signature, that provides the ability for you to be able to take the first shot on an enemy or penetrate an enemy air defence system without being detected because you will be delaying the detection range, and that alters all of the tactics. So fundamentally you can do a lot more a lot closer to the enemy than you could in a fourth-generation aircraft.

“Fusion is the second-largest part about it,” Woods continued, “so in fourth-generation aircraft you may have three different displays: one showing you radar information, another showing you electronic emission information and another showing you infra-red information. The F-35 blends it all together into one display, so you as an individual don’t have to waste your brain power trying to match the three up. The aircraft will do that for you to provide a single picture of what the battlespace looks like. That reduces pilot workflow, allowing the pilot to then concentrate on applying whatever tactics they want to do.

“I would say stealth makes the aircraft survivable; fusion make the aircraft lethal – because it’s allowing the pilots to leverage the sensors without having to worry too much about it, giving them the combat edge.”

A further key attribute of the F-35 is that it is not just an air combat platform but key node in a 21st Century warfighting network, McDonald added. “An F-35 node is a sensor, it’s a connector, and it’s also an effector,” he explained. “So the F-35 can go in and provide a kinetic effect, it can provide a non-kinetic effect, but through the connectivity it can also direct the effects of other weapons in the other domains. So a huge part of the value proposition for F-35 is the interoperability, interconnectivity – and as that interconnectivity expands it will be more and more across the domains, and not just with other F-35s.” This latter quality is reaching ever higher levels, so that countries like Germany that are just coming on board the programme are set to benefit significantly.

“It’s very significant that Germany’s going to be receiving Lot 18 aircraft, which means they will have the Tech Refresh 3 (TR3), and they will have significant elements of what Block IV capabilities are coming forward,” McDonald noted. “If you think about TR3 as the hardware enabler for the new capabilities that Block IV comes with, this is the most impressive upgrade of any fighter in the world. It’s 75 major upgrades to systems across the airplane, and those upgrades are focused on the things you’d care about, so number one: the interconnectivity – more and better interconnectivity, not just from the airplanes but across the domains. Number two: the sensors on the airplane, while they’re already some of the best in the world, are going to be much, much better. So think about that fifth-gen stealth airplane being able to go deep into enemy territory and now the sensors are really stepped significantly. And then the last piece is the weapons capability and capacity: more different types of those weapons and more carriage of those weapons.”

A New Way of Training

The standard programme solution for F-35 training is that pilots and maintainers are initially trained in the United States at Luke Air Force Base (AFB) and Eglin AFB respectively, while some European air forces have a degree of training capability in country to conduct continuation training.

The exception to this is the United Kingdom (and also Australia), which decided from the outset to have a fully sovereign capability in training on and maintaining the aircraft. In 2018, therefore, with the UK’s first F-35 unit, 617 Squadron, having been formed and trained on its STOVL F-35Bs alongside US Marine Corps pilots at Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort in South Carolina, all UK F-35 pilots and maintainers returned to the UK to set up at RAF Marham: the main operating base of the UK’s Lightning Force.

With Europe’s other F-35 operators there is currently a discussion ongoing as to whether a European Maintenance Training University (EMTU) should be set up. One key reason for this is that a lot of the European F-35 users have an issue with European Military Air Worthiness Regulation (EMAR) compliance, which is closely related to civil aviation requirements. US personnel have no need to accommodate this, meaning that the F-35 programme does not cover it. An EMTU working group has therefore been established by the European users, which Germany as a new user will probably also be invited to join.

Given that all F-35s are single-seat aircraft and cover a wide variety of mission sets, pilot training on the aircraft is consequently much more simulator intensive. Woods noted that, while the ground school for a fourth-generation would take three to four weeks before a pilot would fly in a two-seat conversion trainer with an instructor, for the F-35 in the UK the ground school takes about eight to nine weeks. Pilots have therefore flown around 35 hours in a simulator before climbing into an actual F-35 for their first flight. From that point onwards the split between synthetic and real flying is around 50:50.

While LM’s McDonald noted that: “everybody that I’ve spoken to who went through the training said it was seamless to go from the simulator to the airplane”, Woods pointed out that it was something of a misconception to simply say that the F-35 is an easy aircraft to handle. “It’s an easy aircraft to fly, but it’s quite hard to operate; the pilots are asked to do a lot more,” he explained. “During the training course here at Marham BAE Systems delivers comprehensive training against every single mission set that an F-35 can do, so we’re doing air to air, air to surface, we’re doing suppression of enemy air defences, and we’re doing surface-air counter tactics. So compared to another training system – be that F-16, F-15, Typhoon – the pilots graduate here having a lot more experience of operational mission sets. So traditionally at an operational training unit conversion course [where a pilot typically converts from an advanced jet trainer onto the unit’s aircraft type], Typhoon would take about four months, but F-35 takes about a year because we’re asking students to do a lot more, and we have to give them a lot more training, so when they come out the door here they’re almost ready to go into combat in any type of mission.”

Furthermore, Stephen Brown, Head of F-35 Training at BAE Systems, pointed out that simulation “is now more important than ever because you can’t really practise everything than an F-35 can do in the live environment for various reasons”. One key reason for training synthetically on the F-35 is to avoid giving away its true capabilities to any adversaries that might be paying close attention. “It’s highly important that simulation capability is concurrent, is accurate and is available,” said Brown, “because without the simulation [F-35 pilots] would quickly fall behind on currency and quickly become a less capable force.”

One key training advantage is the growing size of the international F-35 fleet itself. “The biggest advantage [as new F-35 user] countries are coming on board – say when Germany gets their airplanes – is there’s going to be a thousand-plus airplanes out there flying with a long history of going through this early piece of it,” said McDonald. “And the training that they’re doing in the US initially but more importantly, I think, at the operational training exercises that they’re engaging in around the world, and the air policing, for instance, that we’re seeing as a result of [the situation in Ukraine], they’re operating the same airplane and they’re having conversations with countries that have been operating it for quite a long time.” He added: “I think that learning curve from fourth to fifth gen will be much, much quicker for every country going into F-35 because it’s a community of operators now, and they can go to the country next door – not just to the United States – to find out the best ways to employ the airplane.”

Support

While some European nations have yet to declare how they will support their F-35 fleets, others have been supporting and maintaining their aircraft for a few years now, with senior European partners the UK, Italy and the Netherlands being at the forefront of these activities.

In the UK the joint industry team of Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems has sustained the UK F-35 fleet out of RAF Marham since it arrived from the US in 2018. On 4 April 2023 it was announced that Lockheed Martin and the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO) had signed the Lightning Air System National Capability Enterprise (LANCE) 23-27 contract with BAE Systems providing the majority of the personnel in support of the UK’s F-35 national support solution. The joint industry team will thus continue to deliver air crew, ground crew and mission planning training; technical and operational support; IT support; supply chain management and expertise; as well as maintenance capabilities for the UK F-35 fleet out to 2027. Lockheed Martin Aeronautics will manage the JPO contract and provide the interface to the F-35 Global Support Solution.

Italy, meanwhile, hosts an F-35 final assembly and check-out (FACO) facility in Cameri, which is operated by Leonardo. This was the first fully operational international F-35 production site and delivered the first internationally built F-35 in December 2015. The Cameri site also operates a maintenance, repair, overhaul, and upgrade (MROU) facility that provides depot activities for Italian and international F-35s.

In 2019 the US Department of Defense selected the Netherlands to store, ship and manage spare parts for over five hundred F-35s, with consortium OneLogistics being the umbrella organisation delivering European supply chain support for the F-35 sustainment programme.

“Talking about building up sovereign solutions for Europe, the Netherlands have been very public to say they’re going to have a national air vehicle depot, which they want to have to address their sovereignty and capacity needs,” Nick Smythe, Director of Sustainment Business Development for Europe at Lockheed Martin, told ESD. “There are other countries that we’re in discussion with regarding national air vehicle depots that just haven’t revealed themselves publicly yet.” Smythe concluded, “But that’s essentially the landscape for maintenance, repair and overhaul,” adding “It’s really knowing how to be flexible to meet a sovereign need and that’s what we’re going to be focused on.”

In terms of the F-35 supply chain, there is essentially a global spares solution. “To make the aircraft affordable – this is the principle – each nation doesn’t have its own separate spares holding,” explained Brown at BAE Systems. “There is a global spares holding, dotted around the world, that all nations can tap into. So we will hold some spares here at Marham, for instance, but not all, in what’s called our retail warehouse here. If we have a spare to hand then it’s used. If we don’t, then you make a claim into the centralised system, asking for a spare. That system then finds where the nearest spare may be in another country and will literally move it to your location.”

The one exception to this, noted Neil ‘Shiner’ Wright, Ground Training Delivery Manager for the F-35 at BAE Systems, is that the UK holds a deployable spares pack, given that the UK Lightning Force will sometimes need to deploy on board one of the Royal Navy’s two aircraft carriers: HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales. “If a squadron suddenly had to deploy tomorrow, there is a protected pool of supplies that will get them in [and provide] the first few weeks of stores,” Wright explained. “They’re ringfenced in the warehouse and ready – ‘in case of emergency break glass’-type stuff.”

To deploy the F-35 on its carriers the UK also has simulators that are effectively housed in ISO containers. These provide continuation or mission rehearsal training for the UK F-35 pilots once they’re on board the carrier. BAE Systems also supports UK deployed operations by embarking its own instructor pilots and synthetic technicians under what are known as ‘contractors on deployed operations’ (CONDO) regulations. Other aircraft types have never required this capability.

The Challenge of Maintaining Stealth

While the US Air Force has been operating stealth, or low-observable (LO) aircraft for decades now – the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk attack aircraft was in service from 1983 until 2008, while the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bomber entered service in 1997 – operating a stealthy fifth-generation aircraft in the form of the F-35 has presented a challenge to maintainers in European air forces.

“On legacy aircraft you would have talked about 10 maintainers per aircraft. For an F-35 that ups that to 12, purely based on that extra low-observable restoration work you’ve got to do,” explained Wright at BAE. The problem is essentially two-fold: firstly, as the F-35 is a relatively new type, certain parts are needing to be replaced sooner than expected; secondly, the maintenance regime for preserving stealth is perhaps more of an art than a maintenance process.

“The theory is that the things you’ll replace regularly should be behind either hinged or powered panels and these have their own way of sealing, so you don’t have to do any restoration work as a maintainer with them,” Wright noted. “However, we’re still in the early days; not all the component parts have been thoroughly life tested, so some items are failing lower than originally planned and they’re embedded deeper in the jet because they’re supposed to be ‘life of the jet’. Now we’re probably still a few years from getting all that ironed out. That’s one of the problems of buying into a programme really, so we’re having to train all maintenance students on how to get into parts of the aircraft that weren’t intended to be opened up.

“From a stealth maintenance perspective you’re trying to maintain the outer mould line [OML],” Wright continued, “so quite often you hear LO maintenance referred to as OML maintenance; it’s maintaining that outer mould line. If you think of it as a monocoque design, the more you keep that intact, the more you can maintain the stealth of the jet.”

To address the challenge, BAE Systems has set up a dedicated LO workshop and is training its student maintainers from the outset in the new skillsets required. “It’s a specialist skill to look after the coating in an efficient way and it requires people who have artisan skills,” Brown added. “People who are good at arts and crafts, quite frankly, are the sort of people who tend to do this the best. And it’s not necessarily a single trade; it’s people who just have the knack for doing this sort of thing. We’ve quickly learned that it needs careful selection as to who actually does it and we’ve adjusted the training accordingly.”

“One of the things we learnt early on is that it’s recognising damage as well and keeping on top of the aircraft,” Wright noted. “It’s a different way of thinking, so a little blemish in the wrong place is not good, whereas a big gash in other places is acceptable.”

All the required repairs to an F-35 are fed into a low-observable health assessment system that analyses how stealthy the aircraft is. “It’s just a case of keeping on top of that continuously,” said Wright. “If you follow the programme, you’re supposed to send a low-observable specialist out to do that sort of check, but we can’t afford that and it’s very time consuming, so we’re training the youngsters, really, who are coming through at the beginning of their career, how to do that for us.”

However, that is not to say that all F-35 users are experiencing LO maintenance in the same way. LM’s Smythe told ESD, “There’s a common misconception about LO maintenance and the F-35. Where previous stealth aircraft were actually quite heavy on LO maintenance, there have been many design and supportability improvements worked into the F-35 where LO maintenance is now a very small part of maintenance performed on the F-35, less than 1% of all downtime, in fact.”

A New Level of Interoperability

New fifth-generation challenges notwithstanding, the F-35 is proving to be the transformational platform that it always promised to be – in capability, of course, but also in operation, training, support and maintenance.

Moreover, with such a wide-ranging European adoption of the F-35, air combat interoperability among NATO nations promises to achieve levels never before seen on the continent, or, indeed, around the globe.

Peter Felstead