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.
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.
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.
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".
These flight hour things are pretty meaningless. They're fancy graphs to function as ragebait for normies.
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.
I have no idea what timeframe they're going off of for the F-35 figure but I'm going to bet that it's not "baselined" to the latest software release. If they're going by 'since it first flew in 2006', then that flight-hour figure has a shitload of test and development baked into it, which other aircraft like the F-22 would not, because they weren't flying while still under development.
Real story related to this: In the F-35 there are 8 flight control computers (built by Moog - yes, the automotive company). Every single block up to 2B, these computers were a piece of shit. They broke all the time, and replacing them was a time-consuming pain in the ass.
But they learned what the problem with them was, and we replaced them with -41 series numbers. And from that point on, they basically never broke.
That kind of problem would ordinarily be found in normal pre-release testing, and wouldn't 'count' against flying costs, but the F-35 was designed different.