It looks like a cross between a KIA T-50 (body and inlets) and a F-15SE (tail). They can call it the T-50SE 🙂

Thanks for the confirmation

I have seen many postulate that he sees the F-35 as the deathnell of the European fighter production capability.

Sweetman = no agenda? Have you been reading his stuff??? The man hates the F-35 with a passion (and has been reprimanded for it).

Not paid? What do you call advertisers?

Are you guys ever this critical of Sweetman when he writes his articles without providing any sources?

It seems that some are willing (and surreptitiously) moving the goal posts to make the F-35 look like a cost failure.

http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/pentagon-caused-most-of-the-increases-in-f-35-costs-so-it-can-fix-them?a=1&c=1171

70-80 percent of all the increases in the cost to keep the F-35 flying are a consequence of changes in the way the Pentagon tracks and manages the program.

…

Instead of the 33 bases where the original 2002 sustainment estimate said the planes would operate, officials decided 49 was the right number. Instead of a 30-year lifespan, they decided it should be 50 years (without any increase in flight hours, making the whole program intrinsically less efficient). Instead of 253 major items of support equipment, they decided 525 would be needed. They also doubled the number of squadron logistics kits and quadrupled the number of initial training sites. Amazingly enough, estimated sustainment costs went up.

Another thing they decided to do was express long-term sustainment costs in “then-year” dollars, meaning dollars that include inflation. The only problem with that is no one has the foggiest idea what inflation rates are likely to be between now and 2065, the span of time covered by the estimates. So they made them up. Rather than reporting the cost of sustainment in today’s dollars — which would be about $500 billion over 50 years — they quoted an utterly unprovable price-tag of $1.069 trillion. Needless to say, the latter number increased congressional concerns about affordability.

But the bean-counters didn’t stop there. They neglected to mention to Congress in reporting F-35 sustainment costs that the existing fleet of tactical aircraft already costs about 20 percent more to sustain each year than they estimate the F-35 will ($12 billion versus $10.6 billion annually). They also failed to mention how the cost of sustaining the current tactical fleet will escalate using the same counting rules applied to F-35 as cold-war planes grow increasingly decrepit. If that information had been reported, it would have been apparent that the yearly cost of keeping all those ancient fighters flying will be nearly twice the estimated cost of F-35 sustainment by 2020. Follow that same trend-line out 50 years, and the legacy fleet costs four trillion dollars to keep flying, versus barely a quarter of that for F-35.

IFF is not radar. I hate sloppy reporting.

Not so fast.
I read a million times on every different aviation forums that on later block upgrade, the F-35 will acomondate more missiles inside those W-bays.. alltough it has been pretty quiet on the subject lately as the delays became a reality.

Now, the real question is.. how will this possible be done..?:)

Just to clarify:
1. In the current config both AMRAAM stations can be fired supersonically at “max speed”.

2. The current plan is to add a double AMRRAM rack in the place of the single bomb rack on the A2G station. This is planned for Blk5.