Since the incident, the Marines have instituted a policy requiring F-35B pilots not to engage afterburners for more than eighty seconds cumulatively at Mach 1.3, or forty seconds at Mach 1.4. Sensitive sensors buried inside the skin of the rear tail surfaces could also have proven susceptible to damage. Heat damage also “compromised the structural integrity” of the horizontal tail and boom of an F-35C. However, the documents obtained by Defense News reported that heat from afterburner exhaust caused an F-35B to experience “bubbling and blistering” of its radar-absorbent materials (RAM) and of its horizontal tail surfaces and boom. These bypass the jet's turbine to inject fuel directly into the tailpipe, producing a huge boost in speed at the expense of gulping fuel and causing a brilliant plume of hot exhaust to trail behind the fighter, as you can see in this video. Like all but a few jet fighters, the F-35 relies on afterburners to sustain supersonic speeds. Officially, all models of the F-35 have a maximum speed of Mach 1.6, though such speeds are rarely attained in routine operations. Remarkably, these eight-year-old incidents had not been previously reported to the public, despite numerous critical reports by the Government Accountability Office and Department of Testing & Evaluation. However, a June 2019 scoop by Defense News journalists Valerie Insinna, David Larter and Aaron Mehta has revealed thirteen serious Category-1 flaws remain.Īs reported by Insinna and Larter, on two occasions late in 2011 an F-35B and F-35C flying near their maximum service ceiling of 50,000 feet damaged themselves using their afterburners to attain speeds of Mach 1.3 and 1.4. After eighteen years of troubled and controversial development, the Lockheed F-35 Lightning stealth fighter may soon enter mass production, many of its bugs having been expensively squashed after delivery of an initial four-hundred “low-rate-of-initial-production” aircraft.

Lockheed f 35 top speed