Saab said in one of its full-page ads in the Czech media this month that the Gripen E has “half the operating costs and much higher operational availability.” A report last Thur. by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) makes it clearer what the Swedes were getting at. The GAO, which is similar to the Czech NKÚ audit office, reported that the air-vehicle availability rate for the United States’ F-35 fleet was 51% in March 2023 and that the mission- capable rate was about 55%. The GAO also highlighted the estimated life-cycle cost of $1.7 trillion for the U.S.’s planned 2,500 F-35s in then-dollars, of which $1.3tr is associated with operating and sustaining the aircraft. That works out to $680m per jet, or about Kč 15.5bn in crowns. This is in the same ballpark as the Kč 400bn figure quoted recently in Parliament by Andrej Babiš for the 24 jets that Petr Fiala wants to buy. It’s a lot of money, but Fiala can takesome comfort in knowing that the army will only need about half as many F-35 pilots.

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