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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nF-35C Lightning IIs and F\/A-18E\/F Super Hornets fly over Naval Air Station Fallon’s (NASF) Range Training Complex on Sept. 3, 2015, in Nevada.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Photo Credit: Lt. Cmdr. Darin Russell\/US Navy<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst with the Teal Group, said Trump\u2019s tweet reflects “an interesting debate,” albeit one from years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “For the Navy, at least, he\u2019s not wrong about the plan,” he said. That service has limited its F-35C buys while continuously adding money into its budget for Super Hornets and its electronic warfare-capable brother, the E\/A-18 Growler, which is manufactured on the same production line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But “eventually somewhere towards the tail end of this administration, the Navy will have to shift to the C,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aboulafia also acknowledged the difficulty of transforming an aircraft like an F\/A-18 into a fifth-generation fighter. Super Hornets “are strike aircraft for a carrier deck. It\u2019s a useful strike fighter for a large carrier, but its fundamentally a different aircraft. You can\u2019t just make it stealthy,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Earlier this week, Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, the F-35 joint program office chief, charted the progress of the program since it hit a Nunn McCurdy breach and was rebaselined in 2011. Since then, Bogdan said Monday, the F-35 program had operated mostly on schedule and mostly on cost, although he acknowledged that the end of developmental flight tests could be delayed by as much as seven months. The program also will likely need $532 million to finish development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “If anybody would have told us in 2011 that we would be within a few months and a couple hundred million dollars of a $13 billion re-baseline, we\u2019d all slap the table and say, ‘We\u2019d take it!'” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “This program is not \u2018out of control,\u2019” he added, referencing an infamous Trump tweet from earlier this month that claimed just that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n Bogdan then met with Trump on Wednesday to talk over the F-35 program. Boeing head Dennis Muilenburg<\/p>\n\n\n\n and<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lockheed CEO Marillyn Hewson also had their own meetings with the president-elect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Muilenburg framed the conversation as favorable, saying that they were “very productive” and that he was “really encouraged” by the “good, open discussion,” according to pool reports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hewson declined to give a statement, but Trump offered his own take:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We\u2019re just beginning, it\u2019s a dance. It\u2019s a little bit of a dance. But we\u2019re going to get the costs down and we\u2019re going to get it done beautifully.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aaron Mehta contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" President-elect Donald Trump may have had his meetings with the Lockheed Martin chief executive officer, but he\u2019s not ready to play nice, tweeting on Thursday evening that he could look to Boeing\u2019s Super Hornet as an alternative to the F-35.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":25701,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":7,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":{"2":{"categories":["news","your-military"],"primary_category":""},"4":{"categories":["your-air-force","news"],"primary_category":"your-air-force"},"6":{"categories":["news"],"primary_category":""},"7":{"categories":["news"],"primary_category":""}}},"categories":[7,8,19],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3384],"class_list":["post-35155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-air","category-congress","category-pentagon"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"UYJRI5CZKJGT5DKLZGDBJWY5N4","arc_canonical_url":"\/air\/2016\/12\/22\/trump-tells-twitter-he-wants-a-super-hornet-with-f-35-capabilities\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n