Posted on 10/20/2015 7:19:16 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Good point. As the U.S. Navy transitions to the P-8, there's going to be a lot of P-3s headed to the boneyards.
Good points, all.
How many F-35’s do think will be built? We stopped building F-22’s way too early. F-35 countries are dropping out, the latest surely, Canada.
Depends on politics. It's gonna cost a fortune, but as long as Trump or Cruz win next year, expect to see the F-22 restarted and the F-35 run gets halted.
Operational costs for the smaller (1/2 the number of engines, for example) S-3 will almost certainly be cheaper than the P-3.
Plus South Korea doesn’t need the range of the larger aircraft. And I think the P-3s have less hours remaining on the airframes than the S-3s do.
The S-3s also left service with some interesting surveillance capability, thanks to the integration of the LANTIRN pods that were inherited from the F-14 fleet and integrated. The final S-3 deployment wasn’t even from a carrier, but rather land-based in Iraq providing real time suveillance. I wonderof the South Koreans will get any of those pods?
I think I’ve read somewhere that DoD did the Cortez thing and had the F-22 tooling destroyed so the line couldn’t be restarted.
So the F-35 is it. Despite all the teething problems, I think the F-35 is going to turn out to be a really good strike-fighter. It won’t match the F-22 in the air supremecy role, but it’ll be a world-beating replacement for the AV-8B and Legacy Hornet, as well as the long-retired F-117. And for the F-16 in everything but the day-fighter role.
I wasn’t thinking about range (distance) so much as total time in the air on patrol without landing or refueling.
SoK already uses the P-3C, these are the second tier to replace their former S-2 Trackers.
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