F-35 and F-22. Photo from Military Photos And Photoshops
War Is Boring: Australian Wing Commander: Sell Us New F-22s
Chris Mills wants America to export Raptors.
Retired Royal Australian Air Force wing commander Chris Mills doesn’t like the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that Canberra is buying from the United States. Noting the new plane’s sluggishness and poor results in simulated air combat against the latest Russian fighters, Mills has called for Australia to lobby the United States for F-22 Raptors.
It’s a problematic suggestion. The U.S. Congress banned export of the Raptor and would have to reverse its legislation in order to sell the plane abroad. Lockheed Martin shuttered the F-22 assembly line in Georgia in 2012, although the company did preserve the tooling. As recently as mid-January, U.S. Air Force secretary Deborah Lee James called another round of Raptor production “pretty much a non-starter” owing to the high cost — as much as $17 billion for 75 fresh aircraft.
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WNU Editor: The decision to end the production line for the F-22 is not going to be reversed .... it is going to be the F-35 or bust.
1 comment:
WNU Editor,
A correction:
" The decision to end the production line for the F-22 is not going to be reversed .... it is going to be the F-35 and bust."
As the "legacy" fleets wear out and the F-35 variants remain in the prototype stage*,
The "future/planned/expected" non-American customers for the F-35, will have to buy small (expensive) lots of the legacy aircraft still in production, and the Gen. 4.5 aircraft, in order to maintain an airforce.
(*all of the F-35 aircraft produced to date require hundreds of mechanical and software fixes to address known problems, and there are mechanical flaws and software glitches, that there are not yet even patches, let alone a fix for).
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