Quote:
Originally Posted by Hatter
If I'm not mistaken, one of the reasons for purchasing only 65 F-35's was due to the perception of higher survivability due to stealth technology. If Canada decides to abandon the F-35 procurement, do any of you think we'll see a larger purchase of jets?
If the F-18SH is half the price of the F-35A, would there be a logical reason to expand the purchase to say, 90 jets? Or if they went with the Eurofighter, would they buy ~75?
Obviously the maintenance and flight hour costs would be higher with a larger fleet, and we'd need the extra pilots, but it's interesting to consider.
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Flight hour costs wouldn't be higher necessarily for more planes of a different make. Off the top of my head Lockheed projected that flight hour cost for the F-35 was twice that of the super hornet. I don't have the math in front of me but I think we could get something like 160 Gripens, 130 super hornets, 90 Eurofighter or Rafales for the price we were going to spend on the F-35. CC is right, if this plane was performing as advertised there would be no question it would be the plane to beat.
I think Lockheed has enough money and contracts to survive this but it's sure gonna hurt if the US govt scraps their plane.