The Liberal government announced in early 2023, that it would purchase 88 F-35s in a project costing $19 billion. DND officials also confirmed the full life-cycle cost for the F-35 project would eventually tally $70 billion.
The first of Canada’s F-35s will be first delivered to a U.S. military base in 2026 and then into Canada in 2028. Canada plans to operate the aircraft until 2060.
In recent days, some Canadians have voiced concerns online that the U.S. has installed a specialized kill switch that could disable the Royal Canadian Air Force’s F-35 fleet.
DND spokesperson Kened Sadiku said no such switch exists on the aircraft, but he did acknowledge that the U.S. is in charge of both software and hardware upgrades for the planes.
Algeria is already purchasing Su-57s from Russia, perhaps Canada should call Putin up?
No no, he would not place kill switches in them. What do you mean that Putin once gave Israel the codes for Iran’s Russian-supplied Tor-M1 air defense systems? Pure nonsense!
But seriously, cmon Canada, sell your F-35s to my beloved Putin in exchange for Su-57s! It would be the best trade agreement of all time.
Yeah, that’s not a bad idea
The Saab Aerospace marketing team just looks on at this exchange in dismay.
Why would any Western ally buy anything military from Russia? Maybe sell the Junk F-35 to them for a good price. And then buy European fighter jets.
Europe isn’t using modern fighter jets, they’re flying fourth generation fighters while America, China, and Russia are starting to fly sixth generation jets.
But yeah it would make more sense to buy from China if you’re trying to put pressure on America. America does not see Russia as a near-peer adversary, and Europe is even less threatening.
Russian fighter jets are only 5th generation on paper.
I don’t know Russian fighter jets actual performance specs, and unless you work for the Russian military, you don’t know that either.
What we can say is that Su-57s have been used in Ukraine to strike targets behind enemy lines and they haven’t been shot down by F-16s or Patriots so it looks like it does the job it was designed to do.
If you do work for the Russian military, I hear Warthunder isn’t correctly modeling your plane’s performance, you should post the Su-57 flight manual on the forums.
We have intelligence from Ukraine. For one the SU-57 stealth capability sucks, second they are not fully equipped.
Third Russia can only make about 3 per year, and have only very few of them.
The reasons they are not shot down by Ukraine is that Russia keeps them within Russia, out of range and behind air defenses, second that Ukraine does not use F-16 offensively, but exclusively defensively.
Sure, just like our intelligence from Ukraine told us 1 Ukrainian shot down 50 Russian jets. Until the jets are actually being shot down, we can’t say that the stealth doesn’t work with any level of confidence. The fact that they’ve sunk so many resources into it suggests that at least Russia believes it can do things their 4th gen fighters can’t.
And be subject to the same issue from the Russians!?! The European initiatives (and Sweden) are a much better idea, even if they are still a generation behind.
Nah! Cmon my dude, Putin is very trustable and would never place kill switches in export Su-57s.
I mean just look at him! how can you imagine him doing such a horrendous thing such as installing a kill switch on export Su-57s? Putin is very great guy! Just don’t ask what happened to Iranian Tor-M1s.