The first Lockheed Martin [LMT] short-takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) F-35B assembled outside the United States rolled out of the Final Assembly and Check Out (FACO) facility in Italy on May 5.
The Italian FACO is owned by the Italian Ministry of Defense and is operated by Leonardo in conjunction with Lockheed. It has a current workforce of more than 800 skilled personnel engaged in full assembly of the conventional take-off and landing F-35A and F-35B aircraft variants. The facility also produces wings for the F-35A.
The next Italian F-35B aircraft is scheduled for delivery in November 2018. The Cameri FACO has the only F-35B production capability outside the United States and is programmed to produce a total of 30 Italian F-35Bs and 60 Italian F-35As, along with 29 F-35As for the Royal Netherlands Air Force, and retains the capacity to deliver to other European partners in the future.
The Italian FACO is also producing 835 F-35A full-wing sets to support all customers in the program. The FACO was selected by the U.S. Department of Defense in 2014 as the F-35 Lightning II Heavy Airframe Maintenance, Repair, Overhaul and Upgrade facility for the European region. The 101-acre facility includes 22 buildings and more than one million square feet of covered work space, housing 11 assembly stations, and five maintenance, repair, overhaul, and upgrade bays.
“Italy is not only a valued F-35 program partner that has achieved many F-35 program ‘firsts’, but is also a critical NATO air component force, providing advanced airpower for the alliance for the coming decades,” Doug Wilhelm, Lockheed Martin F-35 program management vice president, said in a statement. “Italian industry has participated in the design of the F-35 and Italian industry made components fly on every production F-35 built to date.”
The aircraft, designated BL-1, is scheduled for a first flight in late August and should be delivered to the Italian Ministry of Defense in November. Two Italian F-35As will deliver from Cameri this year, the first by July and the second in the fourth quarter, according to Lockheed. To date, seven F-35As have been delivered from the Cameri FACO; four of those jets are now based at Luke Air Force Base, Ariz., for international pilot training. Another three are at Amendola Air Base, near Foggio on the Adriatic coast of Italy. The Italian Air Force has flown more than 100 flight hours in its Amendola-based F-35As.
After a series of confidence flights from Cameri, an Italian pilot will fly their first F-35B jet to Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., in early 2018 to conduct electromagnetic environmental effects certification.