The F-35: The World's Most Expensive Weapon

Did you know that the F-35 has a projected lifetime cost of $1.7 trillion?
Loukia Papadopoulos

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Did you know that the F-35 has a projected lifetime cost of $1.7 trillion? That’s more than Russia’s GDP and it is estimated that if the lifetime cost of the F-35 was a country, its GDP would rank 11th in the world.

The F-35 is a family of single-engine, supersonic, stealth fighters and currently costs $100 million (or more) with each hour of flight going upwards of $36,000. This is because the F-35 is one of the most complex pieces of technology on the planet.

The weapon is developed by LockheedMartin’s Skunk Works' division and it packs a significant amount of tech into its small, single-seater cockpit. The plane itself is essentially one massive computer, making use of 8 million lines of code.

This code is, however, notoriously buggy., something nobody wants in a powerful and perhaps dangerous weapon. It has been reported that pilots have had to often reboot the radar mid-flight.

To fix this issue, the F-35 fleet is due to receive a projected $16-billion software upgrade. Can this upgrade fix all the F-35's problems and how efficient will the new fleet be? We answer these questions and more in our video.

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