With the USAF F-35 initial operating capability (IOC ) declared in 2016 (if there are no more slips), this means that you can expect tribal knowledge of how to operate and maintain the aircraft to be mature around the year 2020 (if we go by F-22 IOC assumptions).
With that, anyone—be they F-35 JSF partner nations or foreign military sales (FMS) for the deal—would be dumb to order the aircraft until they knew what they were actually buying.
It seems that Norway will delay their purchase of the F-35. That and some of the other wobbly behaviour of the F-35 JSF partner nations, puts the whole mantra of the aircraft’s supposed “affordability” at risk.
This is probably not what JSF program leaders have been looking for, given Lockheed Martin executive vice-president Tom Burbage’s warnings at Farnborough that backsliding partners would incur higher prices: Norway appears to have concluded that the opposite is the case.
Of other early JSF customers, Denmark has deferred its decision and the Netherlands has officially confirmed that cost increases are likely to have a “considerable” effect on its program. In the FY2011-2015 order years – LRIP batches 4 through 8 – well over one-third of JSFs are destined for non-US customers, and program managers have repeatedly said that disruptions to the ramp-up will cause unit cost targets to move out of reach.
A current snapshot of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter memorandum of understanding (MOU)–updated in April of this year–gives an idea of when orders were supposed to happen.
I’m pretty sure the central Program office will ensure F-35 to be affordable, be not confused..
E.g., instead of 65 units being procured, one can therefore simply procure 25-30, etc and one’s original budget will still be successfully met. Viola, affordable… see? Who will need 60 anyway? Greed is not cool…
that’s the big question, how many enemy planes is an F-35 worth? how many Mig-21s/Su-30s/PAK-Fs/X-45c clones?
in a future stealth war, that JSF “stealth light” could really come back to bite us. and I really don’t like the look of its engine nozzle, looks like a IR magnet to me
the sooner they start developing air combat UCAVs the better, because 187 F-22s won’t cut it: stealthy, cheap to buy, cheap to use, effective and expendable. which is why I’m all for the F-16 ELU option for us small EU countries, strategically it’s the best option to wait until we’re out of this economic/F-35 mess
Speaking of affordability, how much would 1,406 F-22s cost on a per unit basis?
(Assuming you could get past the export restrictions in a similar fashion to the F-35, by degrading the stealth capabilities of the export version).
The whole thing will collapse if the russian starts selling export version of PAK-FA for half the price ($100m-flyaway) Why buy JSF for price of 2 T-50? Sure they won’t come with fancy innard, but the russian has lax policy toward avionic and integration, they will gladly help integrate any fancy system that they think will add to their building experience.
This will pretty much include Italy, Turkey. Probably even south Korea or Norway.
Imagine Pak-fa export with German fadec, Russian designed-korean made radar, russian-france missile and whatever India’s trick can muster. T-50 has bigger nose diameter than F-22 btw.
But I suppose we just have to wait until 2011 russian air show when they will finally show the ability of reasonably complete pakfa.
Still, the operational and sustainment costs (Life Cycle) of a strategic T-50 would be significant, on par with a new F-15xx. As such, it’s more of a strategic system which could be purchased as a ‘Hi-Lo’ mix by those who can afford such a ‘dual-mixed’ procurement, imho. Perhaps that could include Korea out in the future, in theory, sure. Thus, maybe in the near-term a Mig-35 would be a more plausible joint-venture in the ‘wild card’ scenario? Heck, that could even be an option for USAF if the F-35A capitulates and everything else in the Plan-B department was successfully and completely in the dumpster! Cheers