Andrew McLaughlin, deputy editor of Australian Aviation magazine, has posted a nearly complete explanation of the F-35 grounding caused by the failure of the Honeywell integrated power package. Still left unexplained is the root cause of the valve failure, which is no doubt the focus of the ongoing safety investigation. Key quotes are below:
"The airplanes are in a stop mode right now because we had a ground incident with an IPP about a week ago where we had a valve that failed," Burbage said. "It's a turbine engine that's driven by fuel and combusted until it starts the main engine of the airplane, and then main engine takes over and runs it on bleed air. There's a valve that has to open to shift from combusted to bleed, and there was problem with that valve."
"We have 1,500 flights and a thousand hours on that piece of machinery and have never seen this failure before, so it's good we can identify these things early."
"The airplanes are in a stop mode right now because we had a ground incident with an IPP about a week ago where we had a valve that failed," Burbage said. "It's a turbine engine that's driven by fuel and combusted until it starts the main engine of the airplane, and then main engine takes over and runs it on bleed air. There's a valve that has to open to shift from combusted to bleed, and there was problem with that valve."
"We have 1,500 flights and a thousand hours on that piece of machinery and have never seen this failure before, so it's good we can identify these things early."
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