Douglas Chapman – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Defence

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Douglas Chapman on 2016-10-10.

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that the insulation on coolant lines in the fuel tanks of UK F35B Lightning II fighters does not suffer decomposition.

Harriett Baldwin

The discovery of insulating material becoming detached from an avionics cooling line located in a fuel tank is not a design or technical issue, but a sub-contractor quality control issue that affects only a small subset of the 104 operational F-35As in the fleet. The UK is procuring the F-35B variant which is not affected by this issue. UK F-35 Initial Operating Capability is scheduled for December 2018 and remains on track.