$400B F-35 program coming along nicely

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The U.S. military has grounded all its new F-35 Joint Strike Fighters following an incident on June 23, when one of the high-tech warplanes caught fire on the runway of a Florida air base. The no-fly order — which affects at least 50 F-35s at training and test bases in Florida, Arizona, California and Maryland — began on the evening of July 3 and continued through July 11.

All those F-35s sitting idle could be a preview of a future in which potentially thousands of the Pentagon’s warplanes can’t reliably fly.

To be fair, the Pentagon routinely grounds warplanes on a temporary basis following accidents and malfunctions to buy investigators time to identify problems and to give engineers time to fix them.

But there’s real reason to worry. The June incident might reflect serious design flaws that could render the F-35 unsuitable for combat.

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Defence chiefs used a fake plastic plane at the launch of the Britain’s new £3 billion warship, we can reveal.

The replica fibre glass plane took the place of the £100 million F-35 Lightning II fighter jet that will eventually ­partner the vessel.

That’s because the real fighter jets are behind schedule, over budget and won’t be ready until 2018.

The Queen, David Cameron and Alex Salmond were at the naming ceremony of the aircraft carrier HMS Queen ­Elizabeth at Fife’s Rosyth dockyard nine days ago.

As far as hundreds of cheering ­onlookers were concerned, there was a fighter jet sitting proudly on the deck of the Royal Navy aircraft carrier.

But it was actually a fibreglass life-size model built by American defence giant ­Lockheed ­Martin.

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