While the announcement of the future combat aircraft to replace the Swiss F/A 18 Hornet and F5 Tiger II must take place at 4:00 p.m. local time today, and the Swiss press understands that the F35A would be favored by its administration , the chairman of the Defense Committee of the American House of Representatives, Democratic Representative Adam Smith, once again crushed the F35 program this Tuesday , during a session relating to the Pentagon's 2022 budget. The Representative of the 9th District of the State of Washington, who had previously described the F35 program as a "bottomless pit" ("rathole" in English in the text), once again violently attacked the excessive costs of ownership of the Lockheed device, as well as its particularly heavy maintenance.
It must be said that the values revealed by Adam Smith against Lt. Gen. Duke Richardson, in charge of lowering these costs within the US Air Force, are particularly edifying. Indeed, the cost of the flight hour of the F35A, still shrouded in a certain opacity according to Adam Smith, would now reach $38,000, a value lying between the $33,000 expressed by Lockheed-Martin in values compensated for the 2012 $ , and the $44,000 previously advanced by the Representative. In addition, the aircraft would require annual downtime for maintenance equal to 131 days, or 36% of the time, within the framework of "normal" peacetime use, including 180 to 200 hours of flight per year, excluding scalable maintenance in order to upgrade devices to later, more modern versions, which are also known to be heavy and expensive on the device .
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