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Lockheed: F-35 Backlog Cleared, Targeting ‘Sweet Spot’ Delivery Pace
An F-35 took to the sky for an aerial display in Singapore prior to the airshow.
Credit: Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty
SINGAPORE—Lockheed Martin has completely cleared the backlog of F-35s that had been parked at its facility in Fort Worth, Texas, following a year-long freeze of deliveries put in place by the F-35 Joint Program Office (JPO).
The company announced Jan. 7 it had delivered 191 F-35s in 2025, a record for the program, after the freeze was lifted. The JPO halted deliveries until July 2024 because of delays to the long-awaited Technology Refresh-3 (TR-3) upgrades.
Steve Sheehy, Lockheed Martin’s vice president of international business development, told reporters at the Singapore Airshow on Feb. 3 that all parked aircraft have now been delivered. The company is expecting to deliver 156 aircraft in 2026—the “sweet spot” for the company. All told, Lockheed Martin has delivered 1,290 F-35s so far.
The delayed TR-3 hardware upgrade is needed for the Blk. 4 software package. The JPO put in place a plan to accept aircraft with less capability than initially expected to receive the aircraft, with full Blk. 4 completion now projected for 2031, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.
It is not yet clear how the TR-3 and Blk. 4 capability will be rolled out to all international customers of the program.
“We want to keep the entire fleet at a certain level of consistent configuration,” Sheehy says. “That is up to [each] nation to make that decision on how they do it.”
The GAO report from September 2025 said that some of the Blk. 4 capabilities will need to be pushed back until the aircraft receives an Engine Core Upgrade, projected now for production to begin in 2031 after a 2027 award. Sheehy says it is a JPO decision on how that will occur.
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