F-35 training center ready for first students

F-35 training center ready for first students
By Michael Hoffman - Staff writer
Posted : Sunday Jun 20, 2010 8:53:45 EDT

EGLIN AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. — The first pilots and maintainers tapped for the new F-35 Lightning II will start a training regimen this fall that the Air Force hopes will be a model for all countries with fighter jets.

The regimen calls for airmen, naval officers, sailors and Marines to learn the ins and outs of the Joint Strike Fighter on laptops and full-motion simulators as well as fly and work on F-35. Instructors will do a dry run of the course in July.

“We’re laying a template for how the free world will fly fighters for the next 35 to 50 years,” said Col. David Hlatky, commander of the 33rd Fighter Wing, which stood up Oct. 1 as the military’s first F-35 joint service training wing.

Right now, the wing has about 200 instructors from the Air Force, Navy and Marines, but should hit full strength of 2,000 by 2014. By then, the wing will have at least 59 F-35s for training; the first one is scheduled to arrive in November.

Each of the services will have a training squadron under the 33rd. Fifteen F-35Cs, the JSF carrier variant, will be assigned to the Navy’s VFA-101 “Grim Reapers” of Strike Fighter Squadron 101, which stands up in 2013; 24 F-35As will fall under the Air Force’s 58th Fighter Squadron “Mighty Gorillas” that also stood up in October; and the Marines will have 20 F-35Bs assigned to the VMFAT-501 “Warlords” of Marine Fighter Attack Training Squadron, which stood up April 2.



unhappycamper comment: I guess if you build training facilities, someone will build an affordable version of the F-35. At the moment they are $243 million dollars, which is tad expensive for a pig in a poke. Plus they have a really neat flight helmet that costs only $250,000 a pop.

GO TEAM!

You'll never get that number down "on paper" because a large part of it is the sunk costs in R&D. The fewer planes you make, the bigger that number actually gets.

But the foreign military sales will be priced more based upon the cost of actual construction. There can be a heck of a profit for the sales, and some of that will be profit for the Government because they'll do the actual selling. These planes will never be "cheap" but the early accounting doesn't take in the effect of getting NATO and other allies to buy versions of them.