Not great certainly, but then by way of comparison Typhoon was four and a half years late when delivered in 2003. Type 45 was three years late and wasn't fully capable for another 3 or 4 years after that (and still has issues). Astute was a lot later still. The Army's FRES armoured vehicle project was initiated in 2001 with an expected service date of 2009. Deliveries of Ajax, which FRES evolved into, are just about getting under way with an aim of having it deployable from the end of 2020.

Brat,

IMHO, you are over-reacting about T-50/Su-57 and Russia in general. Not much less info in the (Russian) media about the machine than US and their allies (those concerned) discuss about F-35. Videos, interviews with pilots, designers, project management, stupid ones from the government and various committees, etc. It just became boring long ago (at least for me),which means that things are moving. But for those who do not know the (Russian) language, it may seem that everything is supersecret. I assume that this is the case with China, too.
Of course reports like US DoD DOT&E are not published here, but this is rather a US-specific feature to make such details open. You may call it "free society", if you like. But, IMHO, while talking about mil.stuff, such words are not applicable.

Frostchamber - I'm not arguing that other programs have experienced problems, but the F-35 is special in many ways. It has never experienced a delay due solely to a cut in funding or to customer indecisiveness (the latter plagued Typhoon for more than a decade); the execution-based delays - getting things wrong and underestimating time and cost to fix) are up there among the record-holders; and its size makes the impact of those problems uniquely large.

And given that the next few years' upgrades will be equal to some entire acquisition programs, it's not the time to forget the history.

Brat - Thanks for the valuable information about Chinese and Russian politics. None of us knew that stuff.

George, your are welcome. It’s part of the ‘history' you seemed to think no-one else knew, and were so conveniently reminding us of.

reads like a line from Alastair Campbell's( 're our ex friend Saddam H) dodgy dossier, and we all know how well the millitary/industrial alliance did out of that...bit like the rest of your bile soaked input..as dodgy as a yesterdays 'kipper..

Typhoon...yawn.. RN should have gone cnt with Rafale and other fw assets into the 21 century and you know it

My only point about Typhoon here was that, like F35, it was one of many defence projects seeing serious delivery slippage. I would certainly never, ever suggest it should have been marinised if that's what you're getting at - that way madness lay.

Indeed.

Meanwhile..

https://img.planespotters.net/photo/...Net_648915.jpg

Aside note: the French did a very nice job of designing CV and CTOL versions of the Rafale in parallel. It started with balancing the requirements so that the variants could be similar, went on to a compact shape without a wing fold, and continued through the first use of CATIA to get the best trade between low scar weight on the CTOL and production commonality.

if you're trying to reopen the CTOL vs VSTOL debate, no point. It has been debated ad nauseam and there are plusses and minuses on both sides from a UK standpoint. The decisions have been taken and the key point now is to make the best of the route we've plumped for. The UK package is a good fit for the UK, but I'm certainly not going to rake over all the whys and wherefores yet again.

We're stuck with what we have.... the decisions were taken years ago

I’m reminded of the joke where a wife wakes up and sees her husband isn’t in bed and a light is on downstairs in the kitchen. She gets up and goes down and finds him in the kitchen brooding over a cup of coffee.

“What’s the matter?”, she asks.

“You remember when you were 16, And I got you pregnant. Then you’re dad said if I didn’t marry you he’d get me done for statuatory rape and banged up for 20 years. So I agreed and we did?”

“Yes?”, she replied.

“I’d have been out in the morning”........

Indeed, ORAC..

No point crying over spilled milk, although there's probably about a trillion gallons of it at current market prices.

What a gaggle of doom merchants.

Cheer up!, they said, things could be worse!

So he did..... and they were......

Oh all right, let's have puppies and rainbows instead.

F-35 Ascending: The Pentagon's Biggest Program Had Its Best Year Ever In 2017

And despite what the doomsayers may say, this is absolutely totally not the same Loren Thompson who wrote this....

If you don’t follow the defense business closely, then you can be excused for believing that the F-35 joint strike fighter is in trouble.

... eight years ago, two months before the program director got fired, leaving in his wake a shambles that took three years to stabilize.

Been reading Thompson's articles for some years, for better and for worse. I find his full disclosure to be of interest in putting his article in context. As to his previous article, one of the salient points remains a fixed reality since 2009 and I think predates the initiation of this very thread on PPRuNe Mil Aviation. (First post was 22nd Aug 2010, 18:51).
While making more Super Hornets might help some customers, the point made in 2009 strikes me as still being true. (Cancellation of F-22 is still, to me, one of those teeth grinding moments).

The point was (at the time) valid to some extent, but was much easier to defend on the basis of the 2009 program of record, which still showed IOCs in 2012-15. (That was clearly moonshine, but it was the official moonshine.)

The "no alternative" argument also begged the question, incorporating the assumption that an alternative had to comply with the entire JSF requirement - CV, STOVL and all. The proper question at the time was "how do we best invest in US air combat forces, given what we now know is the real cost of JSF"?

And the hand-wringing over the "advanced age of existing fighters" is a little hard to read today, now that the last US airplane to be replaced by JSF (in 2046) will be at least 50 years old.

How many are flying?

Find a crystal ball?