Taiwan's new F-16s face a maintenance bottleneck as deliveries finally begin

Taiwan's long-delayed F-16 Block 70 deliveries have finally started, but a legislative budget review reported on 7 October 2026 points to the next constraint. The Legislative Yuan's Budget Center found that the F-16 maintenance centre run by Aerospace Industrial Development Corp (AIDC) had, six years after it was set up, secured Lockheed Martin authorisation and built repair capability for 123 of 372 planned items, or 33.06 per cent, according to the United Daily News.

The finding matters more now than at any point since the centre opened. With dozens more jets on the way, the question for Taiwan's air force is shifting from when the new F-16s arrive to how many of them it can keep flying, and the budget reviews suggest the island's repair base and maintenance spending have not kept pace with its purchases.

Deliveries are finally moving

The first two of the 66 jets Taiwan ordered landed at Chihhang Air Base in Taitung on 2 October. The government budgeted NT$247.2 billion between 2020 and 2026 for the purchase, and the jets were originally due by the end of this year before the relocation and restart of the production line and supply chain disruptions pushed the schedule back, Focus Taiwan reported.

Defence minister Wellington Koo told reporters at the legislature on 6 October that more than 60 Block 70 jets were on the production line, and that tested aircraft would fly to Taiwan at a time agreed with the United States. He said Taiwan was negotiating non-cash compensation for the delays. China Times reported that the air force plans to form its 7th Tactical Wing on 1 December.

Once all 66 are delivered they will join 139 F-16A/B jets already upgraded to the V standard. The Budget Center noted that Taiwan would then fly more than 200 F-16Vs, which Focus Taiwan described as one of the largest F-16V fleets in the world.

A repair centre still waiting for licences

The centre opened in Taichung in August 2020, led by AIDC with a team of domestic aerospace firms, and the United Daily News described it as the only F-16 logistics maintenance centre in Asia authorised by Lockheed Martin. At a results event in 2022, then-president Tsai Ing-wen handed air force airworthiness certificates to AIDC and other firms, which by then had supported repairs on 103 F-16 system parts and 1,047 repair jobs, according to Public Television Service.

Progress on the parts that matter most is better but still incomplete. Of the 30 critical items that most affect F-16 readiness, the centre could repair 17, or 56.67 per cent, by the end of July 2026, according to air force data cited in the review. The Budget Center called the overall licensed capacity quite limited and urged the economy and defence ministries to keep pressing foreign firms for repair authorisation.

The reason it matters is time. A research institute director at the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology said in 2022 that some F-16 components take more than a year from order to delivery. Focus Taiwan noted that domestic repair capability can cut operating costs and strengthen Taiwan's ability to fix battle damage quickly in wartime.

That is the core risk. A fighter waiting for a part shipped from the United States is a fighter that cannot fly, and in a blockade or a conflict, long overseas supply lines may not be available at all. Every item that cannot be repaired in Taichung is a potential gap in readiness.

Money is tilting toward buying, not maintaining

A separate Budget Center assessment of the 2027 budget found that of the defence ministry's NT$691.9 billion in regular spending, 30.08 per cent goes to personnel, 32.47 per cent to operations and maintenance and 37.45 per cent to military investment. Counting special procurement budgets, the ratio of investment to maintenance spending was about 1.58 to 1 in 2025, against roughly 1 to 1 in the United States and Germany, the United Daily News reported.

The report warned that the imbalance could widen as military investment rises sharply in 2027, leaving the armed forces with many high-performance weapons on paper that cannot reach their full combat power because of the cost of maintaining them.

The F-16 programme is the clearest test of that warning. Upkeep for a fleet of more than 200 jets will compete for the same operating money as the drones Koo said the government wants to buy quickly through a supplementary budget, so maintenance needs could be squeezed just as the new aircraft arrive.

What to watch

Three markers will show whether Taiwan closes the gap: whether the share of licensed repair items rises from a third as the Block 70s enter service, whether the compensation talks over the delays deliver practical support such as parts or repair rights, and whether lawmakers move money toward maintenance. Without progress on all three, the new jets risk adding numbers faster than usable combat power.