The U.S. Navy awarded Boeing a $1.3 billion contract for the purchase of the last 17 F/A-18 Super Hornet naval fighters it will acquire, along with a technical data package for platform maintenance. If no new orders come in from foreign customers, the last Super Hornets will roll off the production line in 2027.
On March 19, the Pentagon announced the purchase of 10 F/A-18F aircraft from Lot 46, as well as two F/A-18Fs and five F/A-18Es from Lot 47. Delivery of these Super Hornets is scheduled to begin during the winter of 2026, with final delivery no later than spring 2027.
“We are prepared to build and deliver these last Block III F/A-18 Super Hornets to the US Navy in the coming years,” Boeing said in a statement.
The latter contract has been under negotiation for years by the US. Navy, due to the increase in the unit purchase cost of the Boeing fighter, which in fiscal year 2023 was almost $60 million, but which was increasing in price until it approached the price of the last batches of the F-35C Lightining II. In fact, with the available budget, only 17 Super Hornet fighters could be procured, out of the 20 originally intended.
Stretching the end by two years
In February last year, The Boeing Company had announced that production of new F/A-18 Super Hornet fighters would be completed by the end of 2025, following delivery of the last of the U.S. Navy’s fighters. There was hope that the Indian Navy would become a new international customer for the model, as it was in search of a Western carrier-borne fighter to deploy aboard its aircraft carriers. In the end the Dassault Rafale was the winner of the competition, thus diluting the last hope of finding a new export customer for Boeing’s fighter.
Finally, the new order will keep the F/A-18E/F assembly lines running until 2027, at which time production of this iconic embarked fighter, which entered operational service in the Marine Corps in 1983 and the U.S. Navy in 1984, will likely cease.
Nevertheless, with some 420 F/A-18E/Fs, plus a small fleet of EA-18G electronic warfare aircraft, the Super Hornet will remain the “workhorse” par excellence, and after the modernization of the units to Block III (which will extend the operational life of the airframes from the current 6,000 to 10,000 flight hours), they will continue to remain the most numerous fighter aircraft aboard US aircraft carriers for decades to come.
