F-35 Users huddle in Italy to tout joint maintenance plans

Users of the F-35 huddle in Italy to tout joint maintenance plans
24 Nov 2022 Tom Kington

"AMENDOLA AIR BASE, Italy — Air force chiefs from around the world who flew into southern Italy this week to discuss getting the best out of their F-35s gathered in front of journalists to watch a mechanic working on an Italian jet.

The scene at Amendola air base would have been unremarkable except the mechanic was from the Dutch air force, and was part of a bid to show how F-35 operators can work on each other’s aircraft to save cash, increase efficiencies and show Moscow how united they are....

...The conference at Amendola, which coincided with Falcon Strike 2022, an exercise involving Italian, Dutch and American F-35s, brought together representatives from the surging number of F-35 customers including Finland, Poland, Belgium, Israel, the U.S., Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, the U.K. and Canada.

Italian air force chief Gen. Luca Goretti said shared maintenance was high on the agenda, claiming, “The standardization process in Europe is intense.”...

...Italy is also hoping that pooling maintenance will encourage users to send jets to its fledgeling F-35 maintenance hub at Cameri air base in northern Italy, which has hitherto focused on assembling F-35s for European customers.

Italy has rolled 16 F-35A’s and five B’s off the line so far, while the Dutch – after getting their first nine jets assembled in the United States – have had the remainder of its 32 deliveries to date assembled at Cameri, and will receive another 14 from the line by 2024.

Dutch air force chief Lt. Gen. Dennis Luyt said he would be using Cameri for maintenance services in the future after rating the assembly work at the base....

...[Gen. James Hecker, the commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Africa] Hecker said that by 2034 he expected to see just over 600 F-35s flying in Europe, up from around 140 ordered today. “If we get to 600 F-35s in Europe, that’s pretty powerful and sends out a strong message to any opponent of NATO,” he said.

The U.S. general added, “When you look at Ukraine, neither country has been able to get air superiority and we see what the result is – several hundreds of thousands of casualties in less than a year. If you compare that to the number of casualties we had in twenty years in Afghanistan it just blows it out of the water.”

He said, “So it really shows the importance of air superiority. The F-35 is going to help us gain and maintain that air superiority should we have to go to war with somebody else.”"

Source: https://www.defensenews.com/global/euro ... nce-plans/

https://theaviationist.com/2022/11/25/l ... -red-flag/

Battlefield maintenance integration and more.

Another focus was also the maintenance side of the F-35 operations, with Italian maintenance crews working on foreign F-35s and vice versa, as we could see during the cross-servicing event held during the media day. This is also in line with the Agile Combat Employment doctrine of the US Air Force, and one of the many reasons the 495th Fighter Squadron was deployed with five F-35s to Amendola for the exercise.

“I think it’s really a warfighting imperative to be able to do that, there might be times when a US F-35 has to divert to another airbase, or maybe we can even plan on going to another airbase and we don’t have the maintenance or the equipment to go with them”, said Gen. Hecker. “We’re trying to make it interoperable, so if any F-35 nation can work with any F-35, no matter what nation it comes from, it can work on it, not just refuel it, but rearm it as well. We want to get to that stage in the game and this is the beginning of that.” He also confirmed that this was one of the topics on the agenda for the F-35 Air Chief Meeting.

“If I have to deploy some aircraft in the Netherlands and I cannot perform a cross service team between my guys and the Dutch guys, I need to bring 100 people as well as the jets in the Netherlands, but if we are doing cross-servicing I can only deploy the crew chiefs. That means my deployment cell is 50 guys, 30 guys, and all the other things will be managed by them”, added Lt. Gen. Goretti. “Speed is the key for air power so, when we need to deploy, we have to fly faster and sooner, and if we have people there ready and waiting for us, we just need to send the jets and then we can manage also to bring some more people”. He also mentioned the similar Eurofighter “plug and play” which was recently used by German and Italian fighters in Romania during NATO missions.

NATO going back to the Cold War standard.