ISLAMABAD – An F-35A stealth fighter belonging to the Japan AirSelf-Defence Force’s (JASDF) fleet reportedly disappeared from radars onTuesday, 135 kilometers (84 miles) east of the Misawa Air Base located inthe country’s northern Aomori prefecture.
The JASDF said Wednesday it has found what could be debris from the missingfighter jet, according to broadcaster NHK.
The Air Self Defense Force (ASDF) spokesman told Reuters Wednesday that thepilot of the aircraft, however, is still missing. “We recovered thewreckage and determined it was from the F-35”, the spokesman told Reuters.The F-35 was less than a year old and was delivered to the ASDF in May lastyear, he added, cited by Reuters.
The incident took place during a training flight involving four F-35Afighters. One pilot was on board of the missing aircraft. The missing jetwas reportedly the first F-35A assembled at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industriesfacility in Nagoya.
Japanese Defence Minister Takeshi Iwaya announced Tuesday that Tokyo wouldground the JASDF’s whole fleet of F-35A stealth fighters in the wake of theincident.
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In December, Japan announced its plans to buy an additional 105 F-35aircraft to supplement its originally planned force of 42 F-35 jets,with the additional order’s cost estimated to exceed 1 trillion yen (nearly$8.9 billion). The anticipated purchase makes Japan the largestinternational buyer of F-35 aircraft.
Last August, the nonprofit Project On Government Oversight (POGO) said thatsenior officials developing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter for the US armedforces — the most expensive military program of all time — are coveringup dangerous flaws in the plane instead of fixing them. In particular, theCenter for Defense Information at POGO obtained a document showing how F-35officials were re-categorizing rather than fixing major design flaws to beable to claim they had completed the program’s development phasewithout having to pay overruns for badly needed fixes.
Moreover, a report on the F-35 last year from the US GovernmentAccountability Office showed that the aircraft still had 111 Category Onedeficiencies that may cause death, severe injury, loss or major damage andthat critically restricted the combat readiness capabilities of armedforces using the aircraft, POGO noted. – Sputnik
