Navy's United States Marketing Corps L-ships will need mods for F-35 noise, heat, vibration

The STOVL design requirement is having so many hard effects on all F-35 variants. Things like: hook placement on the airframe of the C.

Also, L-ships will be modified to deal with the F-35B blast, vibration and sound but this will be nothing more than a parlor trick if the F-35 has little or no value as a weapon of war.

Navy officials also said that they’ll have to do refits of the big-deck L-class of helicopter assault ships to accommodate the extreme heat and noise generated by the Marine Corps’ vertical-landing version of the Joint Strike Fighter, the F-35B.

In other testing, the Navy found that its L-class ships would have to be adapted to the F-35, and “ship change notices are going out now to the L-class ships,” said Rear Adm. Mark Darrah, commander of the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division. “We have to adapt the ships to the new environment” that comes with the F-35s, he said.

The Navy was adding thermite coating to the flight decks to guard against the heat blast from the vertical-lift engines of the F-35Bs, Darrah said. Additional baffling will be added to the substructure to lower the decibel level below decks, he said.

All in a time when the U.S. Navy is parking ships for lack of common maintenance money.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes to change an F-35B engine on-board ship.