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This continues to be a scaling perception problem - it takes time to work up planes to full capacity at the safety levels that the peacetime air force demands.

This continues to be a scaling perception problem - it takes time to work up planes to full capacity at the safety levels that the peacetime air force demands. Especially compared to designs that are many decades in service. The F-16 and F-15 where initially designed more then 60 years ago, The A/A-18 based on the YF-17 was started 50 years ago. I suspect that this is just the latest version of people failing to understand how costs and flight hours scaled - the same short-sighted griping that happened when people failed to understand on the cost side.

civilitty 3y ago
People keep pointing that out as a counterargument but it's really suspicious when F-35A availability rates drops below that of an F-22 Raptor after only a few years and the annual flying hours for a five year old F-35A drops to that of a 15 year old F-22. Those metrics might make sense for an F-35C with VTOL but the USAF workhorse variant performing worse than our air superiority fighter? That's shit and we shouldn't be trying to paper it over with "it takes time to work up planes to full capacity." F-35s were supposed to be better because the maintenance burden of the F-22 was too much. The F-22 entered production in 2001 and Lockheed delivered the last one in 2012 while the F-35 entered production in 2006, so we're way past acceptable teething problems in both platforms.