It is officially happening: the first jet that will one day wear a Swiss cross is now bolted together on a factory floor in Georgia. After years of votes, lawsuits and price rows, Switzerland's F-35A has stopped being a PowerPoint slide and started being an aircraft.

On 28 May 2026, Lockheed Martin confirmed that the first Swiss F-35A had entered main assembly at its Center Wing Assembly line in Marietta, Georgia. For a project that has been fought over harder than almost any procurement in modern Swiss history, that is a genuinely big deal.

What just happened in Georgia

The milestone is the center wing assembly — the largest single structural component of the F-35 and roughly a quarter of the fuselage. It is where the wings eventually bolt on. In other words: this is the spine of Switzerland's first stealth fighter, and it now exists.

Lockheed says the jet will spend the next year working its way through manufacturing on a line it claims churns out airpower faster than any other allied fighter in production, drawing on more than 2,000 suppliers worldwide.

Inside Lockheed Martin’s F-35 production line — where Switzerland’s first jet is now taking shape.

Here is the part that surprises people: Switzerland's first jets will not come home first. The first eight Swiss F-35As are slated to land at Ebbing Air National Guard Base in Fort Smith, Arkansas, in mid-2027, where Swiss pilots and ground crews will train alongside other F-35 customers. Aircraft only start arriving in Switzerland from 2028.

And not every Swiss jet will be American-built. Under the offset arrangement Bern negotiated, a large share of the fleet will be finally assembled at the Cameri FACO line in Italy — the European final-assembly site run with Leonardo that also builds jets for Italy and the Netherlands.

The catch: a smaller fleet

While the factory hums, the order has been quietly shrinking. In December 2025, the Swiss Federal Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sport announced it could no longer afford all 36 jets at the price it expected — and signalled it would buy the maximum number that fits inside the approved CHF 6 billion budget. By March 2026 that number had firmed up at around 30 aircraft, six fewer than planned.

The trigger was a roughly $610 million price increase and a bruising row over what "fixed price" actually meant. Switzerland had always insisted the CHF 6 billion was locked in. Washington, it turned out, did not quite agree.

The DDPS put it bluntly: due to foreseeable additional costs, it was no longer financially viable to maintain the originally planned number of aircraft. A US defense official, for his part, pointed to fine print confirming that the jets would be bought under fixed-price contracts, but that the estimated price "may differ from the actual contract price." Not exactly the iron-clad ceiling Swiss voters were sold.

The Patriot complication

The F-35 isn't the only American hardware giving Bern a headache. The same procurement squeeze runs alongside Switzerland's Patriot air-defence order, which is facing delays — reported to run to several years — pushing Switzerland to weigh European and other long-range missile alternatives. When you are renegotiating one big US defence deal, a wobble on the next one tends to focus the mind.

Lockheed Martin, unsurprisingly, is keeping the tone upbeat.

The bottom line

So where does that leave Switzerland? With a real jet on a real assembly line, a training plan that runs through Arkansas, a chunk of the fleet destined to be built in Italy — and a fleet that is now smaller and more expensive per aircraft than the version voters narrowly approved back in 2020.

For a country that prides itself on getting a fixed price and sticking to it, the F-35 saga has been an education in how "fixed" defence contracts really work. The first Swiss Lightning is being born regardless. Now Bern just has to count how many siblings it can afford.

Sources: Lockheed Martin / f35.com (28 May 2026); Defence Industry Europe; Breaking Defense; Aviation Week; The Aviationist; Swiss DDPS.