Even if they don’t need a first day of war strike capability, you certainly don’t want to have to face the prospect of defending against a VLO aircraft, in a non-VLO aircraft.

You haven’t mentioned a specific number, but the folks that you’re getting your gloomy information from have cited those kinds of increases. The USAF has even said the estimates are way off, and they should know. They’ve been paying for the test aircraft, which have been coming in ~20-40% under the CAPES estimated cost(which was $76m). That should demonstrate that the sky isn’t falling.

We’ll have to agree to disagree. Your assertation that the budget issues are not bad just sounds like wishful thinking to me when the program has just gone through a Nunn McCurdy breach process.

Based upon figures which weren’t related to the actual costs LM have been able to deliver the aircraft for. The prices have gone up, but not 80 or 90% like you’d have us believe.

Can you actually read?

All of the above are Level 1,2 or 3 partners.

I specifically said “apart from partners”.

This is the second time you have have not read my posts.

Well, unless major cuts occur in the buys from these partners, the F-35 will have more exports than the the Typhoon, Rafale, Gripen, Su-35, T-50, etc….
I suspect that you’ll see more nations buying them as well, over the next 20-30yrs. I think it’s highly likely Israel will end up buying them, and the last I heard was that Japan was looking at buying 40 of them.

So pointing out that it’s late and over budget is diatribe is it? This for a programme that was going to deliver an affordable platfrom in a reasonable timeframe.

Ignoring stated design goals when you fail to meet them and claiming “success” is a well trodded path.
However for those not blinded by marketing it doesn’t make the original objectives disappear. Let me state again the affordability being a key one.

I’d suggest that it is people like yourself who are less than objective and are in fact the “haters”…of anything that does not agree with your mis-balanced judgement.

Would you care to point out a new fighter program that has been on time and under budget, so we can compare and contrast?

Just look at the 48 AESA powered Su-35 they have on order already for the Russian AF no European AF has anything to compete with it as of now, talk about overkill here.

The Irbis is a PESA design, and Typhoon/Rafales should be able to compete with it quite well.

Well the F-22 can only communicate to other F-22s via datalink. It is capable of receiving data from other sources as well, but it can’t provide its own. By that metric the F-22 isn’t net enabled from the overall force structures point of view.

All combat coded F-22s will be getting MADL, etc… upgrades, so they’ll be able to share data with more than just F-22s.

Dream on. The last quote for Canada cost $138.5mil without spares and maintenance. And that is for A version.

Who was doing the quoting? That price is way off, if we’re talking about the per unit fly away cost, but there have been plenty of recent threads on this topic.