The Pentagon has a problem. Cost of the new F-35 fighter is so high that overseas customers are backing off. It's a nice airplane everyone agrees, but they just cannot afford it. One of the budget busters, after paying the list price for a new fighter, is the cost to fly it, Cost Per Flying Hour.
Despite their best efforts at cooking the books, it looks like the F-35 will cost $24,000 per flying hour. Which adds up quick. And you have to fly it if you want it to do any good. Pilots need about 10 hours a month to stay competent in such a high performance, complicated machine. Figure to have maybe two, maybe three pilots per aircraft, and you get to 360 flying hours a year, or $8.6 million dollars a year per airplane. It doesn't take many years for operating costs to exceed the purchase price. And any experienced person will figure the $24,000 per hour to be a lowball estimate.
So, to make things look a little less bad, the Pentagon is inflating the cost per flying hour of the current workhorse fighter, the F-16. This is also a good airplane, everyone, including the cost-no-objective Americans, flies it. The Aviation Week article did not give the before and after F-16 estimates, but they did quote several people expressing surprise that such a thing would be changed. The F-16 has been flying for over 20 years, we have real numbers going back a long time, and altering them comes pretty close to lying.
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