After more than year of work, engineers and maintenance experts from the US Air Force (USAF) and Lockheed Martin have successfully flown a regenerated F-35A fighter formed by splicing together sections from two damaged jets.
The final restoration stage of the so-called “Franken-bird” project began in 2023 at Ogden Air Logistics Complex in Utah, after Lockheed spent several years analysing the feasibility of the concept.
The air force on 31 January said that work has been completed and the Franken-bird has completed a functional check flight at Hill AFB, also in Utah.
“When we received the aircraft, it was pretty much a shell,” says Senior Airman Jaguar Arnold, the dedicated crew chief for the aircraft.
Both of the two F-35 airframes involved in the project were damaged in separate mishaps. The nose section of F-35 tail number AF-211 was damaged beyond repair in 2020 when the aircraft experienced a forward landing gear separation.
The damaged portion of AF-211 will be replaced with the undamaged nose section of tail number AF-27, an F-35 that experienced a severe engine fire in 2014.
Splicing together the serviceable remnants of each airframe required the fabrication of specialised tooling and stands to support the respective sections. The air force decided to use the project as a test case to see if and how aircraft deployed overseas in the future can be quickly replaced.
The service has described the effort as an unprecedented undertaking at the level of field maintenance technicians.
“There were a lot of tasks to complete that we hadn’t done before,” Arnold says.
The final assembly process involved re-installing landing gear with the proper centre of gravity and installing new flight controls. The joint USAF-Lockheed team also rewired the aircraft, rebuilt the cockpit and installed new avionics computers – tasks normally handled at specialised maintenance depots, rather than the flight line.
Air force personnel also restored the aircraft’s critical low-observable coating and structural profile.
Following the successful check flight in Utah, the newly-generated F-35A was transferred to Lockheed’s F-35 assembly plant in Fort Worth, Texas for final certifications. The jet will ultimately return to Hill AFB for frontline service with the USAF’s 4th Fighter Squadron.
Although technically challenging and time consuming, the air force notes the Franken-bird generated significant cost savings over simply replacing the two damaged F-35s.
The service estimates it spent less than $6 million on the restoration effort, while a new F-35A costs roughly $80 million.
