How much was the second engine developed for F-35 Joint Strike Fighters expected to cost?”
The Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II is a fifth-generation, single-seat, single-engine, stealth-capable military strike fighter, a multirole aircraft that can perform close air support, tactical bombing, and air defense missions.[6] The F-35 has three different models; one is the conventional takeoff and landing variant, the second is short takeoff and vertical-landing variant, and the third is a carrier-based variant. The F-35 is descended from the X-35, the product of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program.
AN INTERNAL Pentagon board has found that the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program — the cornerstone of Australia’s future air defence — is two years behind the publicly announced schedule. An influential congressional quarterly, cqpolitics.com, citing multiple congressional aides and Senate sources on Capitol Hill, said the report revealed the Pentagon’s Joint Estimate Team was far more pessimistic than the Joint Program office, which runs the F-35 project day to day. Australia is part of the consortium developing the aircraft along with the US, Britain and Israel. The Australian Government has indicated that it wants to purchase 100 of the fifth-generation aircraft, and it had been planning on its first delivery by 2013 or 2014. But according to the CQ report, the oversight panel’s calculations have determined that the fighter won’t be able to move out of the development phase and into full production until 2016, rather than 2014 as the
