Program officials set a 65% availability goal for the F-35 fleet.
F-35 defenders will undoubtedly say the 30% fleet-wide figure doesn’t mean much because many of the aircraft counted are in a life-cycle period, such as undergoing major overhauls, during which they would not be expected to be pushed into combat service. There is some truth to that, but the testing director took that into account. The report provides the full mission capable rate for the “combat-coded” aircraft, or those assigned to active squadrons with an assigned combat mission. The portion of the F-35 fleet that is supposed to be ready to fight at a moment’s notice has a full mission capable rate of only 48%.
The Pentagon established a 60-day goal for repair times at the depots. As of February 2023, it took an average of 141 days to cycle an F-35 through the depot process. That was actually a slight improvement from the situation identified by the Government Accountability Office in a 2017 report, when the average time was 172 days.
1.5 trillion for an aircraft that has roughly the same reliability after light use as a Jaguar F Type that was recovered from a swamp
This is very edifying bc the last time i was in a screaming match about the us being a paper tiger armed with wunderwaffen i cam to the conclusion that the massive, massive logistical costs of the F-35 would probably result in entropy defeating the entire fleet even if it was used in a pitched war against an enemy with no air defense. The things have a small payload so they'd need twice as many sorties as older, better planes. So they're in the air twice as long, which means they need massive amounts of maintenance on ship or on base, and if anything seriously goes wrong they can't be repaired in the field, if parts exist to repair them at all.
1.5 trillion for an aircraft that has roughly the same reliability after light use as a Jaguar F Type that was recovered from a swamp
What's another few hundred billion? I wonder what the final cost will be. $3t? $3.5t? More?
This is very edifying bc the last time i was in a screaming match about the us being a paper tiger armed with wunderwaffen i cam to the conclusion that the massive, massive logistical costs of the F-35 would probably result in entropy defeating the entire fleet even if it was used in a pitched war against an enemy with no air defense. The things have a small payload so they'd need twice as many sorties as older, better planes. So they're in the air twice as long, which means they need massive amounts of maintenance on ship or on base, and if anything seriously goes wrong they can't be repaired in the field, if parts exist to repair them at all.