Prime Minister Mark Carney has asked for a review of Canada’s plan to purchase a fleet of F-35 fighter jets.
The deal with Lockheed Martin and the U.S. government is for 88 planes at a cost of about US$85 million each.
A spokesperson for Defence Minister Bill Blair said Carney has asked Blair to look into whether the F-35 contract is the best investment for Canada, or if there are better options.
“We need to do our homework given the changing environment, and make sure that the contract in its current form is in the best interests of Canadians and the Canadian Armed Forces,” Blair’s press secretary Laurent de Casanove said.
There’s also the downgrades and quality control issues you get with buying Chinese.
The quality can’t be that much worse than the plane that can’t fly in the rain and has a risk of decapitating pilots on ejection. It’s not as good at killing American soldiers as the Osprey, but it’s not exactly the epitome of quality.
In any case, Chinese manufacturing builds to specification. The reason they’re perceived as low quality is that you’re buying goods designed to be literally as cheap as possible, both in the development and manufacturing costs, and companies wouldn’t make a profit outsourcing if they spent the same amount manufacturing the product in China.
When your cheap electronic fails because a .5 cent capacitor explodes after a month, it’s not because the country with the biggest manufacturing sector didn’t have access to 5 cent capacitors or the country with the most engineers didn’t have the engineering man-hours available to design it correctly.
There are much larger, systemic issues with Chinese manufacturing that goes beyond just building to specification. Systemic corruption is the number one killer of their high end manufacturing market. The easiest example I can give you is steel. High quality steel is hard to order from China, steel you do order will be improperly marked as hogh quality but in actuality will be lower. This is a foreign and domestic issue, and is the reason why thr Chinese rail lines are constantly under construction.
The Osprey is a dangerous aircraft and everyone knows it, while Chinese aircraft are dangerous while pretending to be safe.