Friday, March 23, 2012

Australia Steps Back from F-35 Buy

Another day, another F-35 fiasco.   This time it's Australia that's getting cold, make that colder, feet on the overdue, over priced, under performer. 

The Canberra Times reports that Australia's defence minister has directed a delay in orders for Australia's second batch of 58 F-35s.

Lockheed Martin vice-president Tom Burbage told an Australian parliamentary defence committee the postponement of plane orders by the U.S. and other countries was ''the single largest contributor to the increases in the unit cost of the F-35."

 ...According to Reuters, the U.S. government decided to delay its order of F-35 jets in order to save $15.1 billion through fiscal year 2017 and allow more time for testing and development.

...Last month, Italy announced plans to cut its order from 131 planes to 90 planes.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Lockheed Martin vice-president Tom Burbage told an Australian parliamentary defence committee the postponement of plane orders by the U.S. and other countries was ''the single largest contributor to the increases in the unit cost of the F-35."

Astounding arrogance. Blame the customer for your crap product design and production problems.

As one aviation analyst put it, F-35 customers should run, not walk, away from this project disaster.

The Mound of Sound said...

It is indeed arrogant but at this point Lockheed probably has nothing to lose from playing hardball.

What's astonishing is how little most people know of the F-35s glaring limitations. When Obama killed the F-22 Raptor in its infancy, he eliminated the aircraft the F-35 was designed to operate with. The Raptor was to be the air-superiority fighter to sweep the skies clean for the F-35, stealth bomb truck. Now we're left pretending the F-35 can do its job and the F-22's. What a farce.

The F-35 is years away from being operational yet the Russians have already begun deploying their stealth-killer, the Sukhoi SU35S with the L-band radar arrays fitted to the wing leading edges.

This is going from bad to worse.