While the announcement of the future fighter plane to replace the Swiss F / A 18 Hornets and F5 Tiger IIs is due at 16:00 p.m. local time today, and the Swiss press understands that the F35A would be favored by its administration , the Chairman of the Defense Committee of the US House of Representatives, the Democratic Representative Adam Smith, once again crushed the F35 program on Tuesday, during a session relating to the 2022 Pentagon budget. The Representative of the 9th District of Washington State, who previously qualified the F35 program as a “bottomless pit” ("Rathole" in English in the text), once again violently attacked the excessive costs of possession of the Lockheed device, as well as its particularly heavy maintenance.
It must be said that the values revealed by Adam Smith against Lt. Gen. Duke Richardson, in charge of lowering these costs within the US Air Force, are particularly edifying. Indeed, the cost per hour of flight of the F35A, still shrouded in a certain opacity according to Adam Smith, would now reach $ 38.000, a value between the $ 33.000 expressed by Lockheed-Martin in compensated values for the 2012 $. , and the $ 44.000 previously advanced by the Representative. In addition, the aircraft would require an annual downtime for maintenance equal to 131 days, or 36% of the time, in the context of "normal" peacetime use, including 180 to 200 flight hours per year, out of upgradeable maintenance in order to upgrade devices to later, more modern versions, which we also know heavy and expensive on the device.
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