For four years the Swiss government told parliament and the public the same thing about its F-35A order: the price was fixed. On Tuesday 8 September 2026 the National Council’s Control Committee published a 95-page report saying that no blanket fixed price was ever agreed with the United States.

The committee — the Geschäftsprüfungskommission des Nationalrats, GPK-N, which is parliament’s oversight body — wrote that against that background it cannot follow the absolute way the defence department communicated to parliament and the public.

What the committee found

The report is a chronology of what the committee describes as an administrative failure. Three findings stand out.

First, on the fixed price itself: the GPK-N concluded that no lump-sum fixed price was agreed with the United States, which sits badly against years of unqualified public assurance from the VBS that one existed.

Second, on how the negotiations were run: the committee found the organisation was not fit for purpose, that the VBS did not manage the negotiations closely enough, and that the flow of information was inadequate.

Third, and most damaging: before entering price negotiations with the United States, the VBS had set no negotiating mandate at all, and the talks were handled by an unusually small circle of people.

That is an extraordinary sentence to find in a Swiss oversight report about the largest defence procurement in the country’s history.

How it got here

Switzerland voted narrowly in September 2020 to fund a new fighter fleet, and in June 2021 the Federal Council selected the F-35A. Thirty-six aircraft were ordered. The fixed price was the political spine of the whole project: it was what made the cost ceiling credible.

A year ago the Federal Council announced that the fixed price could not be held, and asked parliament for a supplementary credit of just under CHF 400 million to cover additional costs claimed by the United States. It later said that because of the overrun only around thirty aircraft could be bought rather than thirty-six.

Both Viola Amherd, then defence minister, and Darko Savic, the Air2030 project leader, left their posts in spring 2025. The precise scale of the additional costs only emerged afterwards.

Where this leaves the order

Nothing in the report cancels anything. The GPK-N is an oversight committee; it examines and it criticises. The procurement contract, the payments already made and the delivery schedule are unaffected by a finding that the department misdescribed the deal.

The political question is what parliament does with it. Only yesterday we covered the SVP and FDP push to restore the full 36 aircraft by voting the extra money. That argument now has to be had in front of a report saying the department could not accurately describe what it had signed.

For MiGFlug, sitting in Switzerland, this is a domestic story as much as an aviation one. The F-35A is still coming, the first Swiss airframe is already taking shape at Cameri in Italy, and the Hornets it replaces are ageing on schedule regardless of what the Bundeshaus concludes.

Sources: Keystone-SDA report published by watson.ch, “Angeblicher F-35-Fixpreis: Parlamentsaufsicht rügt Bundesrat und VBS”, 8 September 2026; investigation report of the Geschäftsprüfungskommission des Nationalrats, 8 September 2026.