Pig can fly on occasion as the F35 Porkulus Project continues to bleed oceans of money.
Welcome to Clown World: the F-35 requires nearly 9 million lines of computer code. Meanwhile, Apollo 11’s Lunar Lander needed only 145,000 lines of code.
There are three variants of F-35: conventional take-off and landing capability in the A, one for some customers with vertical lift capability in the B, and one for safe arrested aircraft carrier landings in the C. For the B, the A’s extra fuel behind the cockpit was replaced with a lift fan to provide vertical lift to support short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL). For the C, the US Navy and US Marines use to approach the aircraft carrier and make an arrested landing – the wings are a bit larger.
The first trouble for the airframe is cost. The F-35 will cost over $2 trillion over the next several decades. This makes it the most expensive defense acquisition program in history. Keeping the Lightning II in the air is also head-splitting. Sustainability costs run about $1.6 trillion – a 44 percent increase since 2018. Then there is the money that goes to Lockheed Martin – we are talking about $442 billion in development and procurement. That results in the over $2 trillion total costs until 2088 when the Department of Defense believes the F-35 will be completely out of service.
An operational readiness rate of 50 percent is bad but the OR is even worse for the B/C models at below one third available.
Last is the problem of aircraft availability. The Department of Defense calls this issue reliability, maintainability, and availability (RMA) problems. In 2023, the F-35 was only available for operations 51 percent of the time. The goal is 65 percent. “Available” means the F-35 can accomplish at least one of its many missions during flight.
The U.S. Air Force’s F-35 Fighter Nightmare Has Just Arrived
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