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> a plane that took [...] a trillion dollars to develop It didn't take a trillion dollar to develop. The trillion dollar figure includes acquisition costs (goi

• djsbs 5y ago
  Now add the expected maintenance costs over the life of the aircraft. - How many hours of flight can the F-35 do before it needs to be hangered? - How long does it take in the hanger? - Can the F-35 even go supersonic without ripping off its anti-radar coat (thus becoming more visible as soon as it decelerates?) - given the cramped space, how capable are aircraft carriers at F-35 repair? How many can they do at a time? What is the duty cycle of the F-35 on a carrier? - Is the plane even finished the design phase? The US should have bought 500 F-22 and given the Navy its own carte blanc design skipping the F-35 altogether.
  • jonnybgood 5y ago
    > The US should have bought 500 F-22 and given the Navy its own carte blanc design skipping the F-35 altogether. Why? The F-22 is an air superiority fighter. The F-35 is a multi-role fighter. They're built for different purposes. It's crucial to understand the difference.
    • Causality1 5y ago
      That's the issue, trying to make one airframe fill three drastically different roles and hence failing at all of them. Every time the F-35 turns in a miserable performance report its mission profile is changed to make it look like less of an embarrassment.
      • dragontamer 5y ago
        In Hearts of Iron, you play as a country during WW2. As Germany, you face threats from Britain (ships, fighters and bombers), France (mostly land forces) and Russia. What do you build? Air superiority fighters win dogfights (F22 today) but are only useful vs Britain. Close Air Support (A10 today) beat tanks, but lose in the air. Multirole fighters (F35 today) work in all three theaters, but not as well as the specialists. Given that the next war might be vs Russia (Crimea situation), Taiwan / China (Naval), or maybe even terrorists in Africa or Middle East, multirole is the obvious airplane to build today. ----- So Air Force wants a multirole fighter that can take off from airstrips / airports. Marines want a multirole fighter that can take off of Wasp Amphibious Assault Ships (ramp launch) Navy wants a multirole fighter that can take off of their Aircraft Carriers (catapult launch). This gives F35A, F35B, and F35C variants. But since they all wanted a multirole fighter, it makes sense to try to make the three variants as similar as possible. You want to standardize the gun, standardize the bullets, standardize the fuel, standardize the software.
      • thereddaikon 5y ago
        The F-35 wasn't intended to do everything. There are certainly those who have tried to make it do everything but that wasn't the intent of the program. For example it was never meant to be an air superiority fighter. While it does have a great radar, missiles and even a gun on the air force version it was never meant to fill the role of an F-15 or F-22. The air force wants to replace the F-16 with the F-35. The new Digital Century program shows the AF hasn't forgotten about the importance of dedicated platforms. However given the cost and development times of modern aircraft it takes a new approach to make them practical. The navy has also been clear about the role of the F-35. It wont ever be used as an F-14 replacement. They are actually working on that separately. As for other customers, different militaries have different missions and needs. It is true the F-35 is capable of filling most roles if needed. Some nations may rely on it as their air defense backbone. That's a secondary capability but when you only have the budget for one fighter and this is the only 5th gen on the open market then its defacto the best option.
    • SkyMarshal 5y ago
      "Multirole" is just Pentagon speak for "smaller, cheaper, and limited, but still stealthy".
      • jonnybgood 5y ago
        No, it doesn’t mean that at all. It’s differences can range from types of munitions to avionics. The fact you said a multirole fighter is more limited shows you really don’t know the differences. A multirole is actually more capable. A multirole like F-35 can do air superiority but it won’t outperform an aircraft designed specifically for air superiority like the F-22. The F-22 does not do air-to-ground strikes. The F-35 can. The multirole fighter is not a new concept.
        • rjsw 5y ago
          The F-22 has done air-to-ground strikes, its problem is just being too expensive.
          • Alupis 5y ago
            Being capable of doesn't make it the primary role. Yes the F-22 can drop a few bombs... but that's the problem.. a few. It doesn't have the load capabilities or external pylons (without compromising it's stealth entirely) to carry significant munitions or preferred role-specific munitions to be really effective in CAS or ground attack. Nor is it's cannon a comparable replacement for the GAU-8.
  • nradov 5y ago
    All carrier aircraft are typically brought into the hangar for several hours of maintenance after every flight. But if necessary the F-35B can be immediately refueled and rearmed on the flight deck and sent right out again in a matter of minutes. Maintainers on a carrier can do fairly complex repairs, including engine replacement. If they need more working space in the hangar then other aircraft can be parked temporarily on the flight deck. The F-35 is primarily a strike fighter so supersonic speed isn't that useful. The biggest problem with flying at supersonic speeds is it drastically increases fuel consumption, and the F-35B has a very limited fuel capacity. British carriers have no tankers. As long as an aircraft is still in active production the design phase is never "finished". Updates will continue for decades. The F-15 design is about 50 years old and it's still not finished. The F-22 production program was cancelled in 2011 because there was just no funding available. It wasn't possible to fight the wars in the Middle East, and procure more F-22s. Something had to give.
  • thereddaikon 5y ago
    "- Can the F-35 even go supersonic without ripping off its anti-radar coat (thus becoming more visible as soon as it decelerates?)" Yes. One of the major improvements over the F-22 is the way the stealth coating works. Its baked in to the skin of the aircraft. It does not flake off, it does not need to be constantly reapplied. The F-22 and all other prior stealth aircraft, F-117 and B-2 are hangar queens because of their fragile stealth coatings. This is not the case for F-35. Not only is a game changer but it was also a requirement to make a carrier based stealth fighter actually practical. "- given the cramped space, how capable are aircraft carriers at F-35 repair? How many can they do at a time? What is the duty cycle of the F-35 on a carrier?" Just as capable at servicing any other carrier based aircraft. The F-35 its actually smaller than the super hornet in every dimension so space shouldn't be a problem. Its much smaller than the F-14 was. And its biggest servicing issue wasn't its size but the complexity of its swing wing. "- Is the plane even finished the design phase?" Ok, now I'm starting to wonder if you actually have informed criticisms or if you are just an F-35 hater and only want to spread FUD.
• jjk166 5y ago
  For anyone else confused, it's 85 F-35s for $12B, not $85B It's also worth noting that these other aircraft are widely criticized as being excessively expensive as well, mostly because of the exact same issues with the acquisition process. For example the CH-53K is supposed to cost half of that, but because only 9 are being purchased this year the fixed costs aren't as amortized as predicted. And that's really the crux of it: the F35 acquisition was always going to be an 11 figure program, but the leading digit could have been a 1 instead of a 4, the price tag is the right order of magnitude, but there were still hundreds of billions of dollars wasted due to mismanagement.
  • colechristensen 5y ago
    You can say wasted due to mismanagement and not be wrong but also designing, building, and maintaining warplanes are among the most complex tasks humans have ever done, and I’ve been on plenty of teams that could barely manage a CRUD webapp so it’s not like being efficiently organized is easy and everywhere. It should be impressive that such a thing is possible at all. And, to be honest, it’s partially a jobs program to keep engineers employed and experienced in case there is a real need for immediate defense work.
    • symlinkk 5y ago
      Is it really that complex? The best software engineers go to FAANG, not defense companies.
      • Zancarius 5y ago
        Aircraft engineering isn't all software though. There's a significantly non-trivial part that is hardware design (arguably the bulk of it), with incredibly tight tolerances, and often unique alloys. All of which can make or break a design. Even just a single component, like the engine, is a massive engineering undertaking. If the company developing the powerplant under-delivers the entire program can be a bust.
      • HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
• verytrivial 5y ago
  Imagine if this level of corporate welfare went towards social care, the environment or education. What a racket.
  • mc32 5y ago
    I think they are like supercars. They cost a lot but that’s because two things: low volume and custom parts or components and special requirements.
  • whywhywhywhy 5y ago
    Imagine how easy life would be if we didn’t pay over the odds for either.
  • dillondoyle 5y ago
    Oh god let's please not add any for-profit subsidies to a broken pharma and healthcare system. It's a plague. I hope the drug price negotiation becomes law and actually saves as much as CBO score projects. I am less hopeful we'll ever be able to get a better healthcare system in the US I'm 100% for clean energy though. But probably not going to happen; Manchin said specifically he doesn't want to subsidize 'what the companies are already doing.' Yet he's good with a bunch of coal and coal employee subsidies... In a lot of circumstances I'd probably agree with his position but this is a crisis. It's like saying we shouldn't have invested in helping develop Covid vaccines because PHARMA is already doing it on their own. There is a greater survival and health risk to think of. If money can help we should spend it.
  • FPGAhacker 5y ago
    In the US, defense spending is ~700 billion, whereas the level of social care spending is about ~3000 billion. Given the relative effectiveness of US healthcare and education, vs the US military, I’d sooner call US social spending a racket.
    • xxpor 5y ago
      That includes Social Security, which is wildly successful.
• akira2501 5y ago
  Your comparisons ignore engine count. The KC-46 has two engines and the CH-53K has three engines. The F-35 has one. If your single engine jet fails on a catapult launch, you've lost that plane, and the pilot has just a few seconds to punch out and save their own lives.
  • KarlKemp 5y ago
    I have no idea what engine count should have to do with argument: my rowboat has two engines (if my partner is coming along), yet I'm willing to part with it for below $ 150 million. It's also safer than most military helicopters and fighter jets, although I won't vouch for its behaviour in carrier catapult launches. I believe the real argument is something along the lines off "yeah, those planes are BIG compared to the F-35", plus something that accounts for the helicopter. Maybe its unit price doesn't benefit from a split-off development process before? Or its expected sales volume is even lower?
• oneplane 5y ago
  None of that matters if an expensive flying gun can't do what an inexpensive robot vacuum can do.
• adev_ 5y ago
  > By the way, the F-35 isn't any more expensive than other aircraft. It is more expensive. And the fact that all "modern" militaro-industriel projects goes over budget is just not an excuse to that. The F-16 program (which the F-35 is supposed to replace) was around 10x less. Even inflation considered, this does not justify this fiasco. Same goes for the F/A-18, the Su-35 or the Dassault rafale. Even the damn entire Apollo program (inflation considered) was currently cheaper with an impact for the society of a complete different scale. Maybe the question should be: Was the utility of this plane worth the cost ? And I can barely find any positive arguments to that. Specially when considering the conflicts USA has been in the last 20 years.
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    It's a work program, not an aeronautics program, and a very efficient way to take a large amount of tax payers money and make it end up in particular designated pockets.
• lmm 5y ago
  > By the way, the F-35 isn't any more expensive than other aircraft. Only because every time the development costs go up they agree to buy more planes so that they can keep the per-plane costs the same. The development costs are wildly disproportionate to other weapons programmes if you properly separate them.
• CRConrad 5y ago
  > the F-35 isn't any more expensive than other aircraft. For example for the latest budget proposal (2022), the DoD plans to acquire 85 F-35s [1] for a total price of $85 BN, or about $150 MM per plane. But isn't that in all probability the same kind of thing as large American IT companies do with their international subsidiaries, i.e. moving money around on paper to where it looks the best? That is, Dell and Facebook and Apple and so on have their European headquarters in Ireland (where corporate taxes are the lowest, and on top of that they negotiate sweet deals to make it even lower), and pay the mother company "royalties" for "use of intellectual property" to siphon profits away to where they're hardly taxed at all. In a similar way, defense contractors make the sale price look like what they think gives the best chance to get the sale (including what the great unwashed public will "buy", so they don't put pressure on their politicians, and those in turn on the military, to reject it) -- but then add that money on to maintenance contracts or future development where it's less visible here and now. Looking at just the stated "sale price" and thinking that that actually represents the "true cost" of a machine seems rather naïve to me.