The United States Navy knows it. The United States Air Force knows it, even some of the Dutch know it. The F-35 that these potential customers are looking at will cost significantly more to operate than what they currently fly. For F-18 users like the U.S. Navy, that could be as much as 40 percent higher. Canada and Australia currently fly F-18s.
All of this assumes that customers can even afford to purchase the F-35 as costs climb and development problems are still many years from being sorted out.
source-U.S. Navy
“The cornerstone of the program is affordability based on a next-generation, multi-role strike fighter aircraft that will have a 70 to 90 percent commonality factor for all the variants, significantly reducing manufacturing, support and training costs.”
-U.S. DOD Joint Strike Fighter Program Office-
And as it turns out, not only were the statements of affordability a sham, so were the claims of commonality between variants. Lies. All lies.
Stealth As An Environmentally Sensitive Coating and as many as 4 + 7 doors for internal bombbays and STOVL. Brand new specialties = brand new CPFH and MMH:FH.
Of course they are trying to pull back from this in other areas: I’m sure the APG-81 AESA is supposed to be a sealed unit and I have a feeling the EHAs were at least -intended- to function that way, pulling much of the FLCS hydraulics.
But the fact remains that whenever you add capabilities, you add resident system structures and maintenance tails to support them and anyone who tells you that you can buy into Stealth on the cheap is a liar.
The big savings will likely be in M&R + R&M. Maintenance & Reliability will improve with smaller fleets and superior service life tracking across fully instrumented and younger airframes; your spares locker being fuller and your cyclative vs. fixed hourly replacement holds for parts shorter, allowing you to keep a more balanced fleet with fewer canbirds.
Roles & Missions may also see an improvment as pilots check fewer multirole boxes and fly fewer (Stealth is a very -non aggressive- tactics game) high energy profilles for missions like SEAD and A2A as well as lolo penetration.
Certainly internal carriage and simulator time will also help, though there is the ‘flying effect’ which seems to indicate that an airframe in regular use is one with more reliable, TAC driven, maintenance.
I am interested in the latter effect because I frankly expect to see a much larger attrition pool and much smaller total flying hours allocation if the F-35 is going to compete with ‘train 10%, deploy 30%, hold 70% in flying reserve’ UCAV superwings of 60-90 aircraft on a much reduced homestation and theater deployment basing totals (even encapsulated in overseas PPME).
The big tell is likely going to be the total difference in training vs. combat hours. If you are only flying 6-8hr days at a leisurely sortie generation pace of 1.2, you will save the fighter some wear and tear. But if you can keep it’s drone standin airborne for 15-20 hours with 8 GBU-39s, you don’t have to generate the same kinds of -total airframes- from your deployment provisional wing to meet MTO tasking orders for most SSC/OOTW fights either. i.e. Each jet may be generating as few as .5 sorties per aircraft.
And thus you will have much larger ramp reserve when someone pushes for more jets. Or a much smaller deployment footprint. The MQ-1 and RQ-4 come to mind here as examples of what a small fleet can do to generate product on fewer sorties (and massively more hours, but low-stress ones).
The F-35 will be the Rolls Royce you take out a few times to give the manned mission it’s due in specific missions (OCA) or specific targets (collaterals dense, deep strike).
The UCAV, with or without VLO coatings, will be your day to day Chevy, once the the IADS is rolled back.
If they can get the fleet mixes and maintenance/flying times balanced out for the theater needs. If they can be bothered to try.
P.S. What’s amazing of course is that the Hornets are twins and the Lightning is a one hole blowtorch.
The A-7 had one pipe and it out ranged, on internal, what the F-18 had with 3 bags. What’s amazing is that the USN started back pedaling to a 300 NM combat radius starting in the 1970s. Must have been that ’50s retro charm.
They then successively retired every platform that had any legs and failed to replace them until they were left with a naval penalized all grown up F-5, which progenitor was only invited to the LWF fly off for the sake of variety because Vought and Boeing’s entries’ planforms were the same as GD’s, whose one strength was pointing its nose. Except that the VTAS/AGILE had been canceled more than half a decade by congress before the A model Hornet hit the decks.
Competent airframe program management never made the leap from the BuAer to NAVAIR.
Well said.
I’m betting a couple of squadrons of SLUFFs in each Air Wing could be used for all sorts of stuff right now.