When comparing the costs of 4.5 gen fighters like Typhoon with F-35 also keep in mind that a lot of stuff that is included in the F-35 must be added to the Typhoon, including various pods (including EW pods!?), drop tanks, etc.

What EW pods? Typhoon has internal jammer.
Attack pods, sure…though Finland already has Litening pods.

Danish numbers were heavily criticized. F-35 life cycle cost is impossible to compute (see Uk lawmekers inquiries), and the way danish estimated other lifecycles was -at best- disputable as they did not use the same sources, numbers etc. For each plane.

Danish lifecycle numbers are not good reference for Finnish competition, as they assumed complete dependancy on ALIS and global spare pool, which, as we already estabilished, does not suit to Finnish requirements – at least not to same extent than Danish.

Only thing Danish evaluation flat out told was that Super Hornet has lower unit cost than Typhoon or F-35 (but it was not said how much). From this it seems that Typhoon’s unit cost at very least is not signifantly cheaper than F-35, and probably more expensive.

And again, have you read the links to the articles from the last two pages? Your presenting self-sustiability as problematic for Finland to choose the F-35. What evidence have you presented to support this concern?

Did you actually read anything I wrote?

To clarify: FAF has minimum requirements for ‘maintenance security’, ie. ability to maintain the planes in times of crisis. It is not explicitly told what those minimum criterias are, but basically FAF expects to have ability to independently operate the plane for at least some time without outside support. If the supplier can’t guarantee this, it is out of the contest. Same minimum criteria applies for acquisition and supports costs, and industry co-operation. Ie. if the plane is too expensive or manufacturer unwilling to co-operate with domestic aviation industry, it is out.

In regards to F-35, it likely means that Finland is looking forward for somewhat similar deal what Israel has.

Thanks to her efforts there are new uniforms for pregnant female soldiers, new kindergardens and the MoD paid 300 million Euro in advance to consulting companies (just in case they need consulting at some point). Meanwhile they closed the Marinearsenal Kiel and the Luftwaffendepot in Erding to save costs. Unfortunately logistics are now a mess. Which nobody could have guessed, honestly.

See, that’s why it was good idea to pay advance for consulting companies, now they can help!

The F-35 has that today, just like the F-18 did when the Swiss purchased it in the 90s. The Swiss in purchasing the F-18 signed up to a US/Swiss eyes only agreement that included the Swiss being wholly reliant on the US for spares, upgrades, knowledge, weapons etc (as well as joining a global Hornet community funding group wide software development). There is no difference between that agreement today with a potential F-35 order and the F-18 order.

In fact, Swiss F-18 acquisation included huge amount of spares, weapons and support equipment precisely to make Swiss Hornet operations less dependant from USA. As I recall, this resulted to some controversy in Switzerland as the Swiss order costed over twice per a/c what Finnish F-18 order did.

MiG-31 for Finland, wow! I knew that the MiG-29 was offered to the Finns in the 1990s

MiG-29 was almost ordered but bilateral trade with USSR collapsed in 1990, thus removing the political incentive to buy equipment from there.
MiG-31 offer was probably some drunken Yeltsin idea. Russians also offered “MiG-29 partnership” which apparently was co-development of MiG-29M. Finns did not consider these seriously, at that point Russian alternatives were already dropped out.

There’s a lot of political strings attached to buying American. France and Russia do not seem to have all of those issues.

Well I dunno, obviously when you buy such valuable and sensitive equipment it comes with political strings, no matter where you buy it from. It is more matter of whether you play safe and acquire equipment from multiple sources to minimize potential effect.

MiG-31 was certainly not available for export in the 1980s, if it ever was available for export?

It was offered to Finland in 1992.
OP criteria of course didn’t specify export requirement, only that it’s in service…
This rules out F-20, which was available for export and even ordered but didn’t enter service.