US Marines buying our Harriers at a knock-down price?

[DarrenL]

Right here's the deal as I see it.

Our first F-35s have made an appearance here - http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articl ... er-365167/

Unfortunately they are B models and we are still contractually obliged to purchase 2 pre-production B models even though we have changed to the C spec model. So we will swap those for C models with the US Marines using the Harrier deal as a sweetener.

So each F-35B (that we don't need) costs close to £100million and we swap them for 2x C models, saving the additional cost of purchasing 2 extra C models (saving £200 million) plus the £116+ million we are getting for the Harriers from the US Marines.

Jim Hacker would be very pleased.

[Hot_Charlie]

TBH, £115m-ish from the USMC is better than £20K a pop from the scrapman. I don't remember such a fuss when every other aircraft that been removed from service in the last 20 years ended up being sold for peanuts and cut up for baked bean cans...