F-35 will not fly against fighters

By Pavel | November 23, 2005 on 12:40 pm | In # Avia news |

F-35 will not fly against fightersPentagon is going to suspend Air Forces modification of fifth-generation F-35 Joint Strike Fighter development program.

This decision is being actively supported by deputy secretary of defense Gordon England. Pentagon is going to stop development one of the three F-35 modifications. “Most possibly devlopment of Air Forces version of fighter will be stopped”, - by the words of England said representative of Department of Defense.

Two other development directions (fighters for Navy and marines) will be continued. As analytics are saying, this decision will cause big difficulties to the Lockheed Martin corporation that plans to export fighter to other countries.

Eight more countries are participating in american fifth-generation fighter development program - UK, Italy, Netherlands, Turkey, Canada, Australy, Denmark and Norway. Besides right now it’s beeing discussed the participation of Israel. The overall cast of the project is about 250 billions of dollars.

Land version of F-35 was supposed to be used in Air Forces. For Navy it’s being developed version with some modifications for acting with carriers. Second version of fighter is designed for marines corps support, it has shorter take-off and landing rolls. By England’s opinion Air Forces may use Navy version of F-35 aircraft.

The problem is that except of UK, that was going to supply the Navy modification of fighter, all other partners of project wanted to buy exactly land verision of F-35.

If decision will be made, beneficiaries would be France’s Rafale fighter, built by Dassault Aviation (AVMD.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) ; Eurofighter, a product of Finmeccanica, BAE Systems and EADS; plus Gripen, built by Saab and BAE Systems.

Source: Reuters

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