At least with F-35 we are getting stealth fighters by the thousand for the western alliance at the end of all of it. Starliner has delivered only pain and sadness.
I'm not that sure about 'thousands'. The cost per flight hour is still more than 40k (LM said it would reach 27k by now), the availability is less than 60% if you take into account the planes who can't do external armed missions. If you don't, its 40%.
From what I've heard they're finally keeping the F135, only doing a software upgrade to improve consumption by 7% (so it might improve availability, since less energy is lost, and a huge issue with the F-35 is heat dissipation at low speed, which breaks electronics).
Parts availability is still a huge issue, the f35 pilots don't have the hours recommended by NATO, they do a lot of simulator though, but right now they have sightly more hours than Russian pilots (which were made fun of). It's less of an issue for the US than Norway and Australia though, since you still have F16.
Still a great plane, but maintenance and parts availability issues will shorten it's life and the amount of usable planes at the same time.
Cost per flight hour is comparable to some other modern NATO jets, like the F15-EX.
But most importantly it's stealth, which is predicted a game-changer in a future near-peer conflict, but also costs to maintain. So if you look at comparable jets it's really only the F-22 or bombers, both of which cost more per hour.
The Chengdu J-20 and Sukhoi Su-57 might be cheaper options, but information is scare.
The F15EX is cost per flight hour is not the same.
F35 is quite a bit more.
While an F-35 can carry 22,000 pounds of munitions to a ceiling of 50,000 feet and a distance of 670 miles at a top speed of Mach 1.6, the F-15EX can haul 29,500 pounds of weapons as high as 60,000 feet and as far as 1,100 miles at a top speed of Mach 2.5.
An F-35 costs $35,000 per hour to operate. An F-15EX costs $27,000 per hour.
Honestly if we can take one conclusion from current events, is this handwringing about military procurement is largely melodramatic. As it turned out Bradley fighting vehicle absolutely kicks ass despite a whole movie filmed to narrate how crappy it is.
F-35 appears to be an airborne version of that. Foreign customers love it, its combat record is stellar, procurement queues are now decade long.
The pilots do. The engineering crew and the armies/navies less, because of its costs. Its hard to have real data, because of armies tendancy to keep it close to their chest, but here is a norwegian report about f35 cost that skyrockets and force them to have less training and less operational capacity:
No luck from UK and Australia. For Australia, i have no hope, but UK might publish something. From what i hard, no particular issue with the RAF, but the Royal Navy grumble a bit (and tbf they shouldn't: 80% of the f35 issues were caused by the UK navy demands).
Also, the selling price for UK, Australia and Norway who helped develop the plane seems to be higher than the selling price for Finland, which i think is weird.
> procurement queues are now decade long
Because it's still in pre-production, when serial production should've started 5 years ago.
The block4 (which will be the production standard) will, despite LM promises to be compatible with TR2, _need_ the TR3 upgrade, no other choice. The TR3 should've been on new planes since 2022. The current planes, with TR3 improvement, were supposed to be out this year for testing, and the DoD refused to take them because it was well below what was expected. Now, the TR3 is finally expected for 2025 (i think 2026 is a far better expectation), which mean Block4 won't be out until at least late 2031.
(Without TR3 and block4: no nuclear capability, no electronic warfare, no anti-ship capabilities, no A2/AD capabilities. A2/AD is what makes the f35 the most interesting plane of the world)
Also F-35 was designed in the middle of the unipolar moment, when nobody really knew what future air combat would look like. Thus it was given the task of developing every technology in the kitchen sink (stealth! sensor fusion! VTOL! multirole! fancy pilot helmet!) and that was all expensive. But it turns out that many of those technologies will be crucial for the future and it’s hard to fault the choice they made ex ante in 2000. By contrast, NGAD has a hugely ambitious development plan too but they seem to know exactly what they want (a teaming stealth air dominance fighter for a peer conflict delivered in the 2030s).
I do thing NGAD is the future, and i hope the US will reduce the f35 commands to focus on the NGAD, which is truly a next-gen plane.
> stealth! sensor fusion! VTOL! multirole! fancy pilot helmet!
Only VTOL was completely new. And maybe fancy pilot helmet? The difficulty is to put everything in a single plane. Honestly, without VTOL (which was asked by the UK Navy), i'm pretty sure the f35 would have had a lot less issues and would've made it to production already.
It’s the same story across the DoD. The HUMVEEs are broken down constantly, armor units spend more time trying to keep their tanks running, than actually training.
Someone mentioned that it’s not just Boeing who isn’t the company they used to be. It’s endemic through out American manufacturing. From the latest Boeing failure, Rocketdyne, Chevy and Ford. America doesn’t build anything any more. What it does build is overpriced and not well engineered.
The F22 has better stealth technology than the F35.
Presently the stealth capability of F35 fight jets is highly reduced
to a design problem where the engine overheats if the F35 is carrying
significant munitions.
The F22 was never sold (that I know of) to other powers.
The next generation fighter that the air force is allegedly testing
now will have much better stealth again and it will not be sold
to foreign powers.
F-35 has exactly the level of stealth that the US is comfortable exporting (the RCS of a plane is something baked deeply into the design of the airframe it can't be really changed for an export variant). F-22 is the "I win" button that the USAF has in its back pocket if it ever starts to get truly pressured in a conflict.
Yeah they might be buying the thousand but operating them is another matter quite entirely. If the United States is having trouble pushing the operational rate past the 45~ish% how are the poorer countries going to fare at this task?
"Stealth" is a meager consolation for an airplane that missed its internal load targeted capability by a factor 4, that is out-maneuvered by anything in the sky, and that the airforce doesn't want.. But contrary to the previous dud Lockheed produced, the airforce cannot wiggle itself out of the problem by not buying it this time around, which certainly is a big bonus for the Lockheed shareholders.
Starliner is also a pile of hot garbage, but it has the benefit of costing the US taxpayers 300 times less than the Lockheed debacle.
There are arguments in the industry that the paradigm has shifted to where dogfighting and the need for that maneuverability is a thing of the past? They are showing up on YouTube at least.
Nobody really knows what large scale combat between stealth fighters will look like, but that paradigm is completely valid for upgraded 4th gen planes.
I think seeing the development of a project like the F-35 as solely a project to produce a fighter jet misses the point. It's a political project, strategic project, international project. "Making a good plane" is also on the list. But you don't just "make a plane". You need money. You need allies (international, political). Saying that a project could have been done at half the cost is very easy. Proving that you could have done the political part of it and still keep it at half the cost is hard.
