Oh look, X is awash with a story about the F-35 again.
(media.scored.co)
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These flight hour things are pretty meaningless.
An E-4 doesn't actually cost that much money 'per hour' to fly. It doesn't land and you figuratively swipe a credit card to fix all the shit wrong with it that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Flight hour costs are a function of how new the airframe is, how ubiquitous, any upgrades its received, etc. There's only 4 E-4s. It's the same reason the B-2 is so expensive "to fly". It actually isn't, you just paid for more up-front.
These flying-hour cost graphs could literally just be interpreted to mean "we need to fly the shit out of these aircraft to get costs down". It doesn't actually save you money to do so, but if you flew the entire F-35 fleet on very gentle missions doing simple laps around the airfield for hours upon hours, it'd technically make it "cheaper" to operate.