somewhere, PukinDog is laughing...Gee yet another major procurement program FUBAR
Pratt & Whitney just ain’t what they used to be.
Blade failure can be pretty bad news in a single-engine STOVL airplane.
And the US has the capability to produce better trained pilots than any other country on Earth. (Maybe Israel can do better, but they aren't talking). The world comes here to learn how to fly fighters.
So with that in mind, what are we doing? Building fewer fighters. More complex and apparently more delicate fighters. Go figure.
We would do well to remember Stalin's axiom "Quantity has a quality all its own".
I hate this plane. I dont understand how or why unit costs have exploded. My guess as to why unit cost hyper inflation happens in the prime bidder on the contracts must outsource every single part down to the smallest. I would guess every one of the outsourced companies oursource everything else to a point where every single part is inspected and slightly turned through a super complex supply chain that only exists to supply one project.
I dont care if this is the greatest attack aircraft of all time, I dont think we can afford it, that its high cost is proof that we cannot make our own stuff in america any more.
I bet this F-35 project produces about the same number of units that the f-22 project. I dont see any need to lay down anymore keels for CVNs because we will not have the number of aircraft to make them a threat. We wont need many future pilots eather because we just wont have seats for them. I find to unbeliveable that we used to do fly offs to see who would win contracts, not we bribe contractors to produce aircraft with over inflated contracts.
Who would like to be the first guy to crash one? How can we afford to lose one in combat. I respected the B-2 price for the reason it was a first strike nuke bomber that could lay waste to nations.....I just dont see that kind of fire power here.
We became weak when we started to belive our own movies. Gosh just look at how the tababan wasted the Marine CO and his crew chief and 5 hornets in a desert rat attack months back.... 10 dirt bags and a crew served weapon in the back of a $500 pickup truck....We better spend billions on ABGD.
To me the F-35 is the modern day version of the F-3 Demon.
What do you expect for a mere $300M a copy for a single engine fighter.
“In February 2011, the Pentagon put a price of $207.6 million for each of the 32 aircraft to be acquired in FY2012, rising to $304.15 million ($9,732.8/32) if its share of RDT&E spending is included.”
somewhere, PukinDog is laughing...When the engineering is perfected they’re obsolete.