Government drops plan to buy F-35 for navy's aircraft carriers
The coalition government has announced it will abandon its plan to buy its preferred fighter jet for the Royal Navy’s new aircraft carriers due to escalating costs and delivery delays.
In a statement to MPs in the House of Commons yesterday, defence secretary Philip Hammond said that the decision to revert to Labour’s original plan to buy the short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) F-35 model was part of an ‘affordable equipment programme’.
The coalition had previously approved the decision to equip Britain’s two new £5bn carriers — HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Queen Elizabeth — with Lockheed Martin’s F-35C Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), a variant that can operate on carriers with catapult and arrester gear.
Hammond said that the costs of fitting the necessary catapults and arrester gear — ‘cats and traps’ — to launch and recover the F-35C from the carriers had doubled over the past 18 months to almost £2bn. He also claimed that sticking with the F-35C would delay the project by at least three years to 2023 at the earliest.
Hammond said: ‘When the facts change, the responsible thing to do is to change your mind, however inconvenient that may be.’
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