The United States Air Force (USAF) was able to successfully restore an F-35A Lightning II using sections from two separate damaged aircraft, returning it to combat mode.
Airmen from the 388th Fighter Wing successfully pieced together two F-35A structures to generate an operational aircraft, which has been named the “Franken-bird”.
The “Franken-bird” is made from two damaged F-35s. One was damaged during a 2020 nose-gear collapse incident at Hill Air Force Base in Utah, and the other sustained damage following a 2014 engine fire at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida.
The restoration project was an interagency effort between the F-35 Joint Program Office, Ogden Air Logistics Complex, 388th Fighter Wing and Lockheed Martin.
Prior to the restoration, the aircraft was parked in a hangar for a year in the 4th Fighter Generation Squadron, where maintainers worked on the final stages of the project.
Senior Airman Jaguar Arnold, the aircraft’s dedicated crew chief, said there were a lot of tasks to complete that his team hadn’t done before at the unit level, emphasizing the challenges of receiving the aircraft in an empty shell state.
Arnold’s team, alongside Lockheed Martin engineers and technicians, rewired the aircraft, rebuilt the cockpit, avionics computers and installed a variety of components rarely seen in flight line maintenance shops.
Airmen also fabricated and installed components and coatings to refurbish the low-observable properties on various sections of the jet.
After the aircraft’s successful functional check flight at Hill Air Force Base, it headed to Lockheed Martin’s facility in Fort Worth, Texas, for final certifications. “Franken-bird” will then return to Hill Air Force Base where it will be flown by the 4th Fighter Squadron.
