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As starts go, it’s hard to imagine how things could have got much worse for the F/A-18F Super Hornet before it entered RAAF’s fleet. Then Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon was certainly not a fan. “I have made it clear,” he thumped in 2008, “that in the end, if the advice comes to me from the review that the Super Hornet is not up to job, I would have no hesitation in cancelling it.”
It was one of many bad write-ups the aircraft suffered after it was declared a stopgap between the retirement of RAAF’s Classic Hornets and the delayed arrival of their true successor, the fifth-generation F-35. What was the point, critics argued, of a freelance fighter in our fleet? It’s a testament to the Super Hornet’s quality that those bad headlines were largely binned from history after representing Australia with such distinction fighting Daesh in Iraq years later.
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