Narrator: The US military expects to spend $1.7 trillion
on this revolutionary stealth warplane:
the F-35 Lightning II.
2021 marks 15 years
since the first flight of this controversial plane.
But high costs may sink the plan
to build nearly 2,000 more F-35s.
Chris: It still has some problems that need to be solved,
and fundamentally, the cost of operating the airplane
and flying the airplane today is too high.
Narrator: Every hour the F-35 is in the air
runs around $35,000,
compared to about $22,000 for an older F-16.
So are the advancements of the plane worth the cost?
We went to Hill Air Force Base in Utah
to find out how this plane
ended up as the biggest weapons program in American history.
This is captain Spencer Weide, call sign Ghost.
He flies one of 78 F-35s stationed here.
Spencer: The F-35 in general is just a game changer.
Between the stealth and the fusion
and just the sensors, the whole suite,
it just makes it so much easier
to fly this airplane tactically than any other jet.
Narrator: There are nearly 500 F-35s in service
in the US military.
And in the last few years,
the F-35 has carried out air strikes against ISIS
in Iraq and Syria.
Spencer: Probably the best compliment
that you can pay to this airplane
is if I wanted to go to war,
this is the airplane I want to be in.
Narrator: So by many measures, the plane is a success.
Casey: The F-35 a lot of times has gotten sort of
a bad rap in the media.
Narrator: There was bad press from the beginning,
but even in 2021, criticism followed the revelation
that operating this fleet of planes
could cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion.
That's equivalent to the total amount
of student debt in America.
Just buying the planes costs $400 billion,
but what are called sustainment costs really add up.
That includes developing, testing, flying, and maintaining
the American fleet of nearly 2,500 F-35s
during a 66-year life cycle that ends in 2070.
Lockheed Martin sent Insider a statement that says,
To truly understand the complex price tag,
we need to look at how it was born.
In 2001, the Department of Defense awarded Lockheed Martin
the contract to design and build
a new generation of fighter jet.
But part of the problem was the same thing
that made it seem great in the first place.
The F-35 was supposed to fit the needs of the Air Force,
Navy, and Marines all in one.
So the military actually had to build
three different models, the F-35A, B, and C.
Rebecca: They're really close
cousins, and they look a lot alike,
but the Air Force had
its own requirements,
the Navy needed a tailhook,
the Marine Corps variant
needed the jump jet.
So it was a mistake to sell the F-35 as one single aircraft.
It's really three aircraft rolled into one.
Narrator: The Marine Corps
wanted to replace Harrier jets.
So it needed short takeoff abilities and vertical landings
for amphibious carriers.
That's what became the F-35B model,
at a cost of $101 million per plane.
The Navy wanted a stealth jet
that could take off and land on supercarriers
to replace the F/A-18.
Enter the $94 million F-35C model.
The Air Force was looking to replace the A-10 and the F-16.
Spencer: I have flown against F-16s in this airplane.
You can end up just showing up behind them,
and they never knew that you were on your way.
You were invisible, you saw them from a long ways out,
they never saw you.
Narrator: Ghost flies the most conventional
fighter bomber version, the F-35A.
It's also the least expensive of the three at $78 million.
The original plan was for all of the F-35s – A, B, and C –
to be nearly identical.
But packing everything into just one kind of plane
created all sorts of problems.
The first B model was meant to hover,
but it was significantly overweight
because of all the functionality
that designers packed into it.
Chris: So, basically Lockheed Martin had to redesign the F-35B.
And because all three airplanes
were being developed together,
it also resulted in some redesign of the A model
and the C model.
This was a major setback to the program,
and it ended up costing
the program a lot of time
and an awful lot of money to redesign.
Narrator: The Navy's C model
needed tougher landing gear and bigger wings
so it could land on a traditional aircraft carrier.
Retired Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan
took over the F-35 Joint Program Office in 2012.
The program had run into
some significant cost and schedule overruns.
It was billions of dollars over budget
and years behind schedule.
Narrator: The original design shared about 75%
in common between versions.
That was meant to cut costs,
but Gen. Bogdan says in the end,
the planes only share about a third of their design.
It was part of the mess Bogdan inherited,
because back in 2006,
the DOD decided to enter production
before testing showed acceptable performance.
Chris: We were going to take all these new technologies
that were not very mature, and we were going to integrate them
in one big bang on the airplane,
and basically hope that it worked.
The problem there is if any one of those technologies
is not mature or doesn't work,
it holds up the entire program.
Narrator: By 2021, Lockheed
Martin had delivered
nearly 500 F-35s to the US military,
with plans for nearly 2,000 more.
Lockheed had delivered more than 200 F-35s
to other governments around the world,
and orders for 600 more are in the works.
The F-35 is being mass-produced,
and Lockheed is expected to deliver
more than 150 planes in 2022.
But the Pentagon has delayed a crucial milestone
called full-rate production
that would officially mark the end of testing the F-35.
A decade and a half after its first flight,
the F-35 still has more than 600 known problems,
mainly related to computer software and hardware.
So maintaining an F-35 turns out to be much more expensive
than anyone expected.
The lifetime cost estimate for maintenance of the F-35 fleet
Craig: Just like you get a new iPhone every couple of years,
we're going to get new computers in the jet
with more capability,
and then new sensors and improved avionics in the aircraft.
Narrator: The F-35 is a flying computer
with 8 million lines of code for the airplane itself
and another 16 million lines of diagnostic tools
that help figure out what's going wrong at any given time.
Absolutely the biggest advantage for the F-35
is the fact that it's self-diagnosing, right.
And if it doesn't tell us exactly what's wrong,
it gives us a general direction to go in,
which saves a lot of time on the back end
when it comes to maintenance.
It takes a lot of the guesswork out of it.
Narrator: And there are benefits inside the cockpit,
since pilots get more information
than in any other fighter jet.
The helmet, a $400,000 custom-fit model,
combines the heads-up display of older planes
with night vision,
as well as a feed from infrared cameras
mounted on the body of the plane.
My awareness is projected to me
in the visor of this helmet.
And it's so expensive because it's binocular —
it projects into both of my eyes.
So those have to be perfectly aligned
so I'm not seeing double.
Narrator: The stealth design absorbs radar waves
and hides the massive heat signature
put out by its supersonic engine.
Spencer: I see everything that's happening out there,
and they don't see me because I'm stealth,
which then just allows me the position to just sit back
and quarterback in kind of a calm environment,
as opposed to kind of the chaos
that you're having to go through if you're in other jets.
Narrator: Where older fighters are seen on radar,
the F-35s are barely a blip.
Of course, the same can't be said for the cost.
And without better affordability,
the military will likely cut back on purchases.
The original plan, and believe it or not
the current plan, is for the
Air Force to buy 1,763 F-35As.
No one really believes that.
It's just sort of out there.
Narrator: Since the military buys planes in batches,
future production could stop at almost any time.
Richard: But most likely that's not the case.
Most likely they'll get maybe 1,100 or 1,200.
In which case you have to keep a legacy force,
fourth-generation fighters,
that work with you and depend upon you, the F-35,
as effectively the,
well, the force that kicks down the door.
Narrator: So two decades into the program
with less than a third of the anticipated planes built,
that $1.7 trillion number is just an educated guess.