bah, when they get to fly one, they’ll just have a smile from one ear to the other.. relax… 😀

the edge may have a saw tooth substructure, but again your picture doesnt show it
would they have the lack of panel fit and then go for saw tooth ?

funny… lack of panel fit on a 60 million euros toy…sure… it’s not LM building it for aussies

when you stop pulling everybody’s leg, call me, we may have a sligtly more serious discussion

if LM can deliver by that timeframe… if my memory serves well, someone posted links to statements that the testing wouldn’t be finished by then… unless you want the RAAF to end the testing on its “production” models, they may need to be postponed

omnirole means it was everything in one plane, actually, and to be able to do so during the same mission.

on could point out many different points, of course, but I talked about the “saw form” on trailing edges mainly because it is quite a significant feature of stealthy designs for the last 20 years or so 😉

http://www.janes.com/news/defence/jdi/jdi100317_1_n.shtml

I think this would be a good thing, I suspect that this “cost-plus” system is actually one of the reasons why things have been sliding so much. Perhaps LM and subcontractors have not had strong enough incentive to keep costs down, why should they when people are throwing money at them after each delay?

If they switch to fixed price the price estimate certainly will go up again — but this time we will get a realistic price estimate. If not LM will find itself in deep manure.

of course, it could be a good thing, except that such deal means you need to have several bidders. With LM alone as now, they can say: “ok, we can make it for so many billions (anything way above initial idea will do) and at 160 million dollars per plane if you order 3000 of them…” and there wouldn’t be much DoD can do about it, except pay, or cancel the whole thing, and do another RFP, where the work done before would place LM in a favorable position against any oponent who’d have to build from scratch.. and you’d get a good 10-15 years delay (to say the least), combined with the need to buy additional aircraft as stop gap measure

well i’ll bookmark this post and when its released that the f-35 is more technically advanced and superior to the f-22, i’ll get back to you
and the f-22 is priced at about 170m if it was re-ordered and the f-35a will be about 80m
but it wont be re-ordered, my guess is one of the black projects have hit pay dirt, hence the cancellation of it as well as the development flaws that would need it to be redesigned

er, today’s projection price for the F-35 is about 80 to 90 million.. but several questions can be asked:

– how much more this price will have to be increased in the end?
– after how many years of production that final price will be reached?
– considering the projectged price aims at a 3000 aircraft for US only (add to that foreign orders), how many orders will have to be cut to remain within limits of various customers’ budgets and how hard will it impact the final price?

if these budgets aren’t extensible (and usually they aren’t all that much) the increase of 60 to 90% in price per airframe will mean significant orders reduction, and that, in turn, should initiate another significant price increase…

I think it was a stupid idea to take the big risk of embarking on manufacturing an untested product.

to me, the most “stupid idea” using your words, was to go after a design not unlike what mcnamara wanted the f-111 to be… a common design for everything but, what’s more, a most modern and cheap at the same time…

whenever you make something “first class”, you don’t get it for cheap… never.

the US are a bit like a poker player who got too comitted on the turn to step back and the other guy goes all in after the river… by betting on a single design to do everything for the next 40 years, there was a very big risk to be stuck with it even if it doesn’t deliver, be it on performance, or on price, or on schedule (even if the last one is the least inconvenient of the three potential problems). today, saying “ok, that’s enough” is quite difficult, and saying “we keep on doing it” isn’t easy either… any way you take it, for the ones to decide, it’s not a good position to be in