A British F-35B stealth fighter stranded in India for nearly three weeks has triggered fresh questions about the troubled jet’s reliability

Defence affairs analysis

A British F-35B stealth fighter stranded in India for nearly three weeks has triggered fresh questions about the troubled jet’s reliability — and risks torpedoing Lockheed Martin’s attempts to lure India towards the fifth-generation platform, potentially strengthening Russia’s Su-57 pitch as New Delhi weighs how best to counter China and Pakistan’s advancing stealth fleets.

The Royal Navy’s highly sophisticated F-35B was forced to make an unscheduled landing at Thiruvananthapuram Airport in Kerala on June 14 after running into severe weather while deployed from the aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales, a ship that itself has faced persistent technical woes since it entered service in 2019.

Since touching down, the prized stealth jet — packed with sensitive electronics, radar-absorbent coatings, and mission systems — has remained firmly on Indian soil for more than 20 days, despite the urgent dispatch of British engineers and specialist teams flown in from the UK to restore the aircraft’s airworthiness.

The Royal Air Force conceded on July 3 that fixing the aircraft on-site was “not viable,” with London now examining a humiliating last-resort option of dismantling parts of the fighter so it can be flown home inside a massive C-17 Globemaster airlifter.

For India’s defence planners, the incident has become an unmissable cautionary tale about the burdens of operating America’s most expensive and maintenance-intensive stealth aircraft, just months after Washington redoubled efforts to market the F-35 to the Indian Air Force as a future counter to China’s Chengdu J-20 Mighty Dragon and Pakistan’s soon-to-be-inducted J-35A stealth jets.

When the F-35B made its unplanned landing, the pilot initially refused to disembark, a move widely understood as standard protocol when the world’s most sensitive fighter lands in a non-aligned country where fears of inspection, technology leaks, or unauthorised reverse engineering run deep.

Behind the scenes, British diplomats reportedly moved swiftly to extract assurances from New Delhi that Indian technicians would not inspect the stealth jet — a reflection of how guarded the West remains over the transfer of fifth-generation technology in regions where Russia remains a close defence partner.

By late June, the aircraft was quietly shifted to an Air India maintenance hangar, shielded from curious eyes, while British teams continued their frantic repair efforts.

Yet the damage to the F-35’s reputation in India’s unforgiving defence ecosystem may already be done.

For nearly two decades, the F-35 program has battled widespread criticism for its heavy maintenance demands, eye-watering operational costs, software glitches, and the lowest mission-capable rates across the entire U.S. Air Force fleet — except for the even more troubled F-22 Raptor.

The short-takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) F-35B variant is notoriously finicky, with unique mechanical complexity that often results in additional headaches when compared to the conventional F-35A and carrier-based F-35C.