Saab JAS 39 Gripen. (Tuomo Salonen at Finnish Aviation Museum, CC BY-SA 4.0)
I was marvelling at the news a few days go that the Ukrainians had placed an order for a number (it’s not important what it is) of French fighter jets recently. They probably made that decision in a week or two, less time than it take for me to decide which shade of blue to pick for my bedroom paint job. It’s amazing how a war can focus your abilities.
As opposed to Canada. When I came to Canada in 1979 they were using the CF-101 Voodoo, and they ordered the CF-18 the next year. For what seems like every day since — 45 years! — we have been talking about a government procurement process to acquire a new fighter aircraft to replace the CF-18, which have cobwebs on them by now.
Now we have an American president next door who doesn’t like us, and we on the southern border are expecting their tanks to roll across the border any day now, and yet they still expect us to buy their F-35s! WTF?! If we’re expecting our former friends to invade us, to make us their 51st state, why would we buy armaments from them! We might as well buy MiGs! To top it off, it has been alleged that if the Americans deign sell us F-35s, they will come with features disabled and the ability for the Americans to make them flying bricks at will.
But the Swedish Saabs are supposedly “old”; they’re not as modern, as cool, as the F-35s will be when they come roaring across the border to bomb us Canadians back to the Stone Age.
Quite frankly, speaking as a pilot, I’d sooner pit my wits in a Saab against a video-game-playing kid in an F-35.