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Pentagon to buy 90 F-35 fighter jets from Lockheed Martin

Xinhua, February 4, 2017 Adjust font size:

Pentagon on Thursday reached an 8.5-billion-dollar agreement to buy 90 F-35 fighter jets from U.S. largest federal contractor Lockheed Martin following President Donald Trump's involvement, said the company in a statement.

The latest contract is for 44 F-35As for the Air Force, nine F-35Bs for the Marine Corps and two F-35Cs for the Navy. The remaining 35 jets will go to international partners and foreign military sales customers.

The price per unit will be 94.6 million dollars for the F-35A, 122.8 million dollars for the F-35B and 121.8 million dollars for the F-35C.

There was a decrease of 728 million dollars from the last batch of the whole contract and the price per jet for the F-35A lands below 100 million dollars for the first time, according to Pentagon.

"We continue to work with Industry to drive costs out of the program," Lt. Gen. Chris Bogdan, F-35 program executive officer, said in a statement.

"President Trump's personal involvement in the F-35 program accelerated the negotiations and sharpened our focus on driving down the price," said the company said in a statement.

In December, Trump tweeted that costs for Lockheed's F-35 fighter jet program were "out of control." However, it's unclear how much Trump's intervention actually helped reduce the cost of the fighter jets.

F-35's cost has risen to 400 billion dollars to produce 2,457 planes -- nearly twice the estimated cost, according to a CNN report last year. More than 1,000 planes were to have been delivered by 2016, but only 179 had been sent as of April, 2016. Enditem