I see the F-35 fly over my house almost every day and just the way she looks, awe. She's larger than I thought she was, wished I could still go on base to get a close look though.
Very good points there Thorsten.
Dear god I dislike this thing with a passion. Australia, and now Canada (my new, adopted home) are helping fund this peice of crap. It's like Dr Porsche went from building tanks to Aircraft. Lets make an overly complicated machine that is superior in everyway except maintainence and payload...oh and fuel range... (althought the F-35 actually does have better fuel range then the F-18F :s) Dont get me wrong it's a big step, and is bound to have problems, but holy crap the budget blowouts and issues are insane. Whats worse is Australia buys an new fleet of F-18Fs, replacing our F-18A's and F-111's and then we're going to fork out even more for 20 or so of these? We were apparently considering the Su-30, only issue was IIRC mating Nato weapons systems to russian hardpoints didnt go down to well.
We wanted the F-22, but were told no, due to top secret issues etc,etc and the fact the F-22 has been withdrawn from US service (the fuck was with that anyway?)
Oh and interesting tid bit I just discovered:
Indian AF Su-30K during the Cope India exercise. The Flankers soundly defeated US Air Force F-15Cs during this exercise, exploiting not only superior BVR radar/missile capabilities, but also the TKS-2 datalink, used to network flights of Flankers (US Air Force image) from this page
http://www.ausairpower.net/flanker.html