The F-35 Has Been Unstoppable in Every War Game It Has Ever Played
“I’ve never seen anything like it before. My wingman was a brand new F-35A pilot, seven or eight flights out of training. He gets on the radio and tells an experienced, 3,000 hour pilot in a fourth-generation aircraft. ‘Hey bud, you need to turn around. You’re about to die.
Here s What You Need To Remember: The F-35 is lightyears ahead of its competition.
As 60 enemy fighters closed in on a US Air Force 4th Generation fighter aircraft, blinding the jet with electronic warfare attacks, an experienced pilot faced unseen life threatening attackers closing in during an air-combat Red Flag exercise closely replicating actual warfare scenarios back in 2019.
The Pentagon wants to make it so by 2025.
What You Should Know: The F-35 is the world s most expensive defense program ever. With time and experience can some of the costs come down?
In addition to being one of the most expensive military hardware platforms ever developed, the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter is also extremely expensive to operate. A year ago it was estimated that the fifth-generation advanced stealth aircraft cost around $44,000 an hour to fly or put another way $44 million to fly 1,000 hours. That could be $352 million over the 8,000-hour lifespan of the jet, which is more than twice as much as every other fighter aircraft in the U.S. military’s arsenal.