Sourced : The Drive
By Tyler Rogoway
With F-35B production ramping up, the AV-8 Harrier is entering into the twilight of its service with the United States Marine Corps.
By most accounts, America’s Harrier fleet has quite a bit of life left in it, especially considering Pentagon picked up the UK’s entire fleet of 74 Harriers, many of which were very young, and all the spare parts that went with them, for cost of roughly 1.35 F-35Bs at today’s prices, or a paltry $177M.
As a result, large quantities of surplus Harriers and ample stocks of spare parts are likely to be put up for sale by the DoD in the coming years.
Considering the jet’s unique short-takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) abilities and its most recent upgrades—in the AV-8B+’s case this includes the ability to execute beyond-visual range air-to-air combat by employing the AIM-120 AMRAAM with their APG-65 radar sets—they represent an attractive and affordable acquisition opportunity for foreign air arms.
According to Jane’s, Turkey is interested in purchasing a number of these soon to be surplus jump-jets to serve as an interim capability before possibly executing an F-35B purchase. This would be in addition to their already sizable F-35A order of 100 airframes. Supposedly Ankara is eyeing somewhere around 20 F-35Bs, so procuring a similar amount of second-hand AV-8Bs makes sense, although we don’t know the exact number they are interested in at this time.
Image sourced : Wikipedia
Read more at : http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/16759/turkey-is-interested-in-buying-surplus-usmc-av-8b-harriers-others-likely-to-follow