Far to the Cold War: How much F-16 is produced per year

Almost 300 F-16 aircraft were produced at the peak of capacities in Texas. Now the pace is much lower, but orders are hundreds. The American F-16 fighter has been in order for 50 years. The War Zone journalists have visited Lockheed Martin in Greenwill, South Carolina. The production line in South Carolina boils with work, it creates fighters F-16 from scratch. The demand for the aircraft in recent years has become greater, so the F-16 Block 70/72 production, which is known as Viper, is ongoing.

The new customers are Bahrain, Bulgaria, Jordan, Slovakia and Taiwan. At the peak of production in 1987, Generaly Dynamics Fort Wark (now part of Lockheed Martin) produced 286 F-16 aircraft. Then they began to produce in South Korea and Turkey. A total of 4599 fighters have been made in 50 years. In 2017, production was rolled up in Fort Flow, but the order continued to arrive. Thus appeared a plant in Greenville with the name H16. Previously, it was used to serve C-130 transporters.

Since 2019, the plant has been fully operational. Now Lockheed Martin has an order on 140 aircraft. Monthly, the plant in Greenvil produces 4 F-16 or 48 aircraft a year. Thus, the company has already reached the target for 2025. All orders will take about 2. 5 years. 700 workers were involved in the production of F-16 aircraft, but in 2019 there were only 25. The Lockheed Martin supply chain is very wide: we recall that the analyst reported why the Ukrainian F-16 is better based in NATO.