As the HMS Prince of Wales and the rest of its carrier strike group docked in Singapore on Thursday, analysts noted that it arrived with an odd number of 11 F-35B fighter jets on its flight deck.
That’s because one was missing: F-35B Lightning number 034 that has been stranded for almost two weeks now at an airport in southern India. The state-of-the-art stealth fighter got caught out by bad weather during a sortie in the Indian ocean and requested an emergency landing at Thiruvananthapuram International Airport, where it has been stuck ever since due to an engineering issue.
