Aerospace

America’s Fighter Jet Makers Are Thriving, Thanks to Trump and Putin


American-made fighter jets, once facing extinction, have seen a resurgence in sales, thanks largely to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Add to that Middle Eastern nations arming for potential war with Iran and there may be more than $80 billion in new or potential sales for F-15s, F-16s, and F/A-18s worldwide.

Trump’s Pentagon budgets over the past two years have enabled the U.S. Navy to keep buying new F/A-18 Super Hornets. His fiscal 2020 budget plan calls for purchasing even more of those warplanes, plus a new variant of the F-15 for the Air Force, which has not purchased Eagles since 2001. Meanwhile, eastern European nations spooked by Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea are looking at the affordable F-16.

Three years ago, just one U.S. fighter jet was expected to still be in production next year: Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, a warplane being built for the U.S. military and a growing number of its allies.

“[W]e basically thought the [F-16] line was finished,” Lockheed CFO Ken Possenriede said March 7 at a JP Morgan investors conference in New York.