Taiwan Receives First of 66 Long-Delayed F-16V Fighter Jets

Two F-16V Block 70 fighter jets touched down at Chihhang Air Base in Taitung at midday on Friday, the first operational deliveries in a long-delayed program to re-equip Taiwan's air force with 66 new Lockheed Martin-built fighters as the island works to keep pace with China's expanding air power.

The single-seat aircraft were flown the long way around, routed through Hawaii and Guam before landing shortly after noon local time, according to Taiwan's Air Force Command, which said the jets would now undergo acceptance checks and conversion training ahead of joining frontline squadrons. Their arrival opens the delivery phase of an $8 billion, 66-jet purchase that Washington approved in 2019 and that was originally supposed to be wrapped up three years ago.

The numbers

Taiwan ordered the 66 F-16 Block 70 fighters, the newest production version of the Fighting Falcon, under a deal the U.S. State Department cleared in August 2019 at a price tag of roughly $8 billion. According to Friday's statement from Taiwan's military, 63 more aircraft remain somewhere in the U.S. production pipeline, meaning the two jets that landed this week represent a small fraction of a fleet that is supposed to eventually make Taiwan the single largest operator of the Block 70 variant anywhere in the world.

The island has stood up a dedicated unit, the Seventh Tactical Fighter Wing, activated on December 1, 2024, to absorb the new jets in phases. Taiwanese pilots and ground crews have been rotating through training in the United States in three successive waves, with the first phase completed in 2023 and the remaining two spanning 2025 and 2026. Once complete, the order will make Taiwan the largest operator of the Block 70/72 configuration of any air force in the world, ahead of existing customers Bahrain, Slovakia and Bulgaria, which each bought smaller batches of the same upgraded airframe.

How a 2019 deal slipped by years

When Taiwan and Washington struck the agreement in December 2019, the plan called for initial jets to arrive around 2023, with the full order wrapped up by the end of 2026. That timeline collapsed almost immediately under pandemic-driven supply-chain disruptions, and it slipped further as engineers worked through software integration problems on the Block 70's upgraded radar and mission systems. Taiwan's defense ministry marked an earlier milestone in the program in March 2025, when it held a handover ceremony at Lockheed Martin's Greenville, South Carolina plant for the very first airframe off the line — itself already roughly two years behind the original schedule.

Beijing has compounded the delay by repeatedly pressing Washington to cancel or scale back the sale altogether, a familiar pattern whenever the United States moves to arm Taiwan. China claims the self-governing island as its own territory and considers U.S. arms transfers a violation of its sovereignty, even though Washington maintains only unofficial ties with Taipei under the decades-old framework built around the Taiwan Relations Act and the 1982 Six Assurances, which commit the U.S. to continuing defensive arms sales without first consulting Beijing.

Who this affects

For the pilots and ground crews of Taiwan's air force, and for the broader 23-million-person population living across the strait from China, the jets are meant to replace an aging fleet of F-16A/B models that first entered service in the 1990s, giving the air force a modernized radar and electronic-warfare suite to track Chinese aircraft that now cross the median line of the Taiwan Strait on a near-daily basis. Lawmakers in Taipei have pressed the defense ministry on whether the air force has enough trained pilots to fly the jets as they arrive; military officials have said additional aviators are being sent through U.S. training pipelines to close the gap.

The delivery also lands at a sensitive moment in Washington's Indo-Pacific posture, with the Trump administration under pressure from lawmakers of both parties to speed up a backlog of approved-but-undelivered weapons systems for Taiwan and other regional partners. Japan, the Philippines and other U.S. allies in the region have watched the pace of Taiwan's arms deliveries closely, viewing it as a barometer of how quickly Washington can turn political commitments into hardware at a time when China's air force is adding modern fighters faster than most of its neighbors combined.

What officials are saying

Taiwan's Defense Minister Wellington Koo told reporters the two jets that arrived Friday would not be the last this year, signaling that Taipei expects the pace of deliveries to pick up before 2026 closes out. Opposition lawmakers in Taiwan's legislature have been less upbeat, pressing the ministry in recent sessions over whether enough qualified pilots will be ready to fly the jets as they arrive in batches rather than all at once. A U.S. State Department spokesperson, asked about the delivery, framed it within Washington's broader regional commitments.

"We continue standing with friends and allies across the Indo-Pacific to advance our shared prosperity, security, and values — that includes Taiwan."

Taiwan's government has consistently cast the F-16V program as central to what officials call "asymmetric" and conventional deterrence against a Chinese military that has rapidly fielded stealth fighters, including the J-20, and expanded its navy over the past decade. Coverage of Friday's arrival noted that the jets reached Taiwan only after years of the kind of production and diplomatic friction that has become a recurring feature of U.S.-Taiwan arms deals.

What happens next

Taiwan's air force says it will coordinate with the U.S. program office on the pace of further deliveries as more Block 70s clear production and testing. With 63 aircraft still in the pipeline and pilot training continuing in phases through 2026, reporting on the program's history suggests the realistic timeline for completing the order now stretches into 2027 and possibly beyond, even as Taipei and Washington publicly maintain that deliveries will accelerate. For now, the two jets at Chihhang Air Base will spend the coming weeks in acceptance testing before Taiwan's air force declares any initial combat capability with the new variant — a milestone officials have not yet dated.