(Luft) Lockheed Martin F-35 - Lightning II

[ObiBiber]

2 neue Berichte zur F35 :?

erstmal zu den Kosten

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A single Air Force F-35A costs a whopping $148 million. One Marine Corps F-35B costs an unbelievable $251 million. A lone Navy F-35C costs a mind-boggling $337 million. Average the three models together, and a “generic” F-35 costs $178 million.
It gets worse. These are just the production costs. Additional expenses for research, development, test and evaluation are not included. The dollars are 2015 dollars. This data was just released by the Senate Appropriations Committee in its report for the Pentagon’s 2015 appropriations bill.

dann zu den Triebwerksproblemen

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter will survive its failure to show up at two major international air exhibitions this month. It was a good thing, in that the non-event showed that the U.S. and British military airworthiness experts had the authority and common sense to put safety first.

The no-show does point to issues with the program. Despite some rhetoric, there is no such thing as an “isolated” failure on the scale of the June 23 fan-stage breakup that caused the recent grounding. The purpose of mishap investigations is to learn lessons that will reduce the incidence of similar events; at the very least, the component that failed was designed at the same time as the other engine parts that have failed, by the same team and using the same tools.

The failure was part of a record that program office director Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan complained about a few months back (AW&ST March 31, p. 29). “Parts that we didn’t think were going to break are breaking quicker than we thought,” Bogdan said, characterizing the problem as a “monumental fix—we are not going to see results quickly.” He added that JSF reliability was “woefully below the curve” compared with where it should be at this stage and that already scary operations and support costs would “skyrocket” if reliability problems could not be fixed. (end of excerpt)