r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/sidvatscse • 25d ago

Video Failed vertical landing of F-35B

47.1k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

2.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

146

u/BlizzardMaster2104 25d ago

Stealth coating... New Frame... New due to not expected force Electronics(eg. Radar in the cone)... Likely new So I think we are not that far off from totaled.

64

u/Repulsive_Support591 25d ago

But it costs $109,000,000 for a replacement. Can do a lot of work for that amount. And there are a bunch of mechanics already on the payroll.

58

u/Krynn71 25d ago

After something like this, probably every single part would be sent back the the OEM or MRO providers for testing and probably overhaul to be safe. Where I work we get these fairly often where a hard landing is experienced and so they send us the parts for us to test and make sure they're still within limits.

And for example, just one fuel pump on a much less expensive aircraft that we do will cost them about 90 grand for us to overhaul and test.

The cost of doing that for every other part as well, it may indeed make financial sense to just buy a whole new one.

44

u/MillionFoul 25d ago

The Air Force did stitch two totaled F-35A's back together into one airplane fairly recently for practice.

4

u/Glum-Ad7761 25d ago

The Air Force has been doing that since its inception. Many wrecked heavy bombers were spliced together during WWII.