posted on Jul, 12 2016 @ 04:24 AM
Another poor defence decision by our UK government that is so far up the US's arse that it's laughable!
They completely ignored the advice given by senior techs in the RAF and the MoD and simply signed up for this program and dismissed the competitors
which would have given us a much more independent platform at a much better price.
While the P8 is a capable platform it's very overpriced and comes with the usual caveats from a bit of US kit :
1. Locked in to US software, we'll see no doubt a repeat of the F35 debacle where we had no access to full source code for the sensor and avionics
packages (even after threatening the US will a pull out of the program we didn't get only got partial access) BAE engineers are still fuming about
that one, joking the Chinese know more about the aircraft than they do!
2. Absolutely no chance of getting any manufacturing work here in the UK, (thankfully the F35 didn't completely arse that section up)
3. Overpriced and we'll not be getting value for money on this program.
Because our government is so desperate to suck up to the US right now, we end up paying 50% more than we should, and it will end up (Like Trident,
F35, AWACS) with us dependent on US companies to provide coding, servicing support, training etc for the lifetime of the program, meaning our
flexibility is reduced. We pretty much are an extra state of the US now defence wise.
Neither the very capable P1 from Japan or one of the Airbus options was even considered, the decision to buy the P8 was a political one, not a
technical one. Indeed the Japanese offered us 5 aircraft for less than $250million, you can't buy two P8's for that and the capabilities are very
close, they offered full technical sharing, even partnership on future upgrade options that could be co-developed with BAE.
A very sad day for the UK defence industry.