F-35: the container that left Australia and stopped in Hong Kong
F-35 fighter jet parts sent from Australia to the United States for repair ended up in Hong Kong, with a radar-absorbent canopy inside the shipment. A 2023 audit had already flagged more than 1 million missing spare parts across the programme in five years.
A shipment of F-35 fighter jet parts left Australia bound for the United States for repairs and turned up in Hong Kong. Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles confirmed the diversion on Tuesday, 22 September 2026, in Adelaide, and said Canberra is assisting an investigation run by the United States and by Lockheed Martin, the programme’s prime contractor, according to the Australian public broadcaster ABC News.
What was in the shipment is the part that matters. Politico reported that the cargo included one of the jet’s canopies, the acrylic bubble covering the cockpit, coated with a thin layer of transparent radar-absorbent material that helps hide the aircraft from enemy radar. Marles described the material as not sensitive: “We’re not talking about sensitive equipment here or sensitive parts,” he said, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP).
The custody chain that was never Australian
The piece missing from the official explanation was already on the public record. The warehouse at Williamtown, north of Newcastle, serves as the Asia-Pacific regional hub for F-35 spare parts, and Australia told parliament in 2025 that it did not control or direct the export of what left it: Lockheed Martin moved the stock, destined for other parts of the world, on commercial flights with stopovers in Asia, per The Straits Times. No Australian facility is equipped to repair F-35 canopies, according to Politico, which is why the part was travelling to the United States.
Shipping was handled by an intermediary working for the manufacturer. The Pentagon’s F-35 Joint Program Office said it was “aware of a shipment issue of unserviceable F-35 Lightning II components” and that it was working to retrieve them, investigate the incident and place safeguards, according to the US news network CNN. The State Department declined to comment, and the Chinese embassy said it was not familiar with the case.
20 countries operate the jet and draw on a shared pool of spare parts. The link that failed sits in a warehouse run by the manufacturer, outside the control of those who fly the aircraft.
The disappearance reached Congress before it reached the Australian press. The House Armed Services Committee, which oversees United States defence policy, said it is following the case and has received multiple briefings, according to Bloomberg. Gertler, a former staff member of the same committee, told Politico that a physical component lets an adversary verify or refine information obtained by other means.
What is not known, and why it matters
It is not known why the shipment was rerouted or who holds the components today. The cargo left Australia in mid-2026, and CNN reported that the route ended in Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China. Marles said Australia is examining “very much everything that has occurred at the Australian end”, without detailing what it found.
Lockheed Martin said it cannot discuss the status of specific shipments or its shipping procedures for security reasons, and that every shipment is handled with the utmost diligence, per The Straits Times.
The audit problem is not new. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report in 2023 found that more than 1 million F-35 spare parts had gone missing over the previous five years, and concluded the Pentagon could not review losses worth tens of millions of dollars because Lockheed Martin controls the information, according to Politico.
Australia operates 72 F-35s and is among the countries sharing the programme’s global spare parts pool, according to AFP. The jet flies in 17 military services across 20 countries, among them Japan, South Korea and Israel, according to Lockheed Martin.
The open question the case leaves is who answers for the shared stock. The depot that receives the parts sits on Australian soil, but the decision on what leaves it belongs to the manufacturer; shipping runs through an intermediary it hires; and the Pentagon itself depends on the contractor’s records to know what has been lost. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) measured that arrangement in 2023 and found more than 1 million spare parts missing over five years, without being able to review the losses. The container that stopped in Hong Kong shows the same structure up close: a batch the programme classifies as unserviceable, moved without national oversight, with part of the cargo still unlocated.