First Swiss F-35A fighter jet enters assembly at Italian Cameri facility after order reduction to 30 units.

Switzerland confirmed on August 14, 2026, that the first structural assembly for its initial F-35A fighter jet, designated MJ-4, has commenced at Leonardo’s Cameri facility in Italy. The joint fuselage section and wing structure will subsequently ship to Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth plant in Texas for final aircraft integration before scheduled delivery. This distributed manufacturing path leverages international supply chains to support Swiss procurement while the Swiss Federal Council scales down total planned aircraft purchases from 36 to roughly 30 units due to budget constraints.

The Cameri complex features 11 assembly stations, 22 buildings across 40.9 hectares, and a nominal annual production limit of 20 aircraft, having completed 19 fighters in 2025. Concurrently, Switzerland reduced its order from 36 to approximately 30 F-35As to avoid an estimated CHF 1.1 billion in financing overruns beyond the original CHF 6.035 billion contract.

Related topic: Switzerland cuts F-35 stealth fighter order from 36 to 30 after failed price talks with US

Switzerland's new F-35A fighters are now being built, with the first Swiss aircraft components assembled in Italy and the first Italy-built F-35A due to arrive in Switzerland in mid-2028. (Picture source: US Air Force)

On August 14, 2026, Switzerland confirmed that the first fuselage section for its initial F-35A was being assembled alongside the first wing at Leonardo’s Cameri complex in northern Italy, after which the joined structure, designated MJ-4, will be shipped to Lockheed Martin’s Fort Worth facility in Texas for integration with the remainder of the aircraft. Cameri covers 40.9 hectares, includes 22 buildings, more than 92,900 m² of covered workspace and 11 aircraft assembly stations, completed 65 F-35s between 2021 and 2025, manufactures roughly one-third of all F-35 wings and is expanding its maintenance capacity from 13 bays to 21 by 2029. Currently, the plant’s annual final assembly limit is 20 aircraft, and output reached 19 in 2025, meaning the line operated at 95% before Swiss production became an additional workload with J-6004.

At the same time, Switzerland is reducing its planned force from the 36 F-35As contracted for CHF 6.035 billion in September 2022 toward roughly 30 fighters because the full quantity would require about CHF 1.1 billion in additional financing beyond the level the Federal Council was prepared to seek. Cameri is not manufacturing the fighter from raw material to completed aircraft. The MJ-4 fuselage section and wing are being worked on in Italy, but that structural assembly will subsequently travel roughly 7,500 to 8,000 km to Fort Worth, where other airframe sections, propulsion equipment, avionics, mission systems and aircraft components will be integrated on Switzerland's first F-35As. This is possible because the F-35 supply chain includes more than 2,100 companies worldwide and distributes structural manufacturing among specialized facilities rather than duplicating a complete production chain in every customer country.

For instance, Germany is focusing on central fuselage production, the United Kingdom participates in rear fuselage production, and Finland, Norway, Belgium, and the Netherlands also hold industrial work at different levels. Cameri’s position is different because it combines structural production and complete final assembly. It is one of three F-35 manufacturing locations alongside Fort Worth and Nagoya, Japan, and is the only European site capable of assembling complete aircraft, including both F-35As and F-35Bs. Switzerland itself will use several manufacturing routes within the same acquisition. The first eight Swiss F-35As are scheduled to be delivered to Ebbing Air National Guard Base in Fort Smith, Arkansas, from mid-2027 for Swiss pilot and ground crew training, while the first F-35 coming from Cameri is scheduled to reach Switzerland in mid-2028, and J-6004 is expected at the end of 2029.

The physical path of J-6004 therefore runs from Italian structural production to U.S. aircraft integration and back to European service, despite Cameri being only about 40 km from the Swiss border. Leonardo completed 12 F-35s in Cameri in 2021, 14 in 2022, 14 in 2023, six in 2024, and 19 in 2025, for an average of 13 aircraft per year. The 2025 output, however, was 216.7% higher than in 2024, 35.7% above the previous five-year high of 14, and only one aircraft short of the nominal maximum. The customer distribution is equally important. Of the 65 fighters, Italy accounted for 31, including 23 F-35As and eight F-35Bs, while 34 were Dutch F-35As. Cameri was therefore already more than an Italian national assembly line before the Swiss order entered production. That customer mix is broadening again.

Poland ordered 32 F-35As for $4.6 billion, and aircraft 3517, the first Polish F-35 assembled at Cameri and the first aircraft from Poland’s second batch of 16, conducted its initial functional test flight there in July 2026. Italy simultaneously added 25 aircraft to its programme of record in 2025. Swiss production therefore has to be inserted into an active multi-customer schedule rather than into spare capacity left after completion of Italian and Dutch orders. The final assembly total also understates what Cameri produces. Leonardo has held a commitment covering 835 complete F-35A wing sets, and roughly one-third of the global F-35 production program’s wings are manufactured there. Those wings can be fitted to aircraft assembled in Italy or shipped to the United States for installation on aircraft that never enter Cameri’s final assembly line.

This means that the 65 complete fighters assembled from 2021 through 2025 measure only one of the site’s manufacturing streams. Wing work began much earlier: deliveries of high-precision components started in 2009, and the first assembled wing section followed in 2012. Cameri consequently has three different forms of throughput: complete fighters moving through the 11 assembly stations, wing assemblies entering the international supply chain, and operational aircraft entering the MRO&U system for depot work. F-35-related imports cleared through Cameri were valued at $555.1 million in 2021, $844.9 million in 2022, $914.1 million in 2023, $932.2 million in 2024, and $1.067 billion in 2025, an increase of $511.9 million, or 92.2%, in four years. Additional F-35 forgings cleared elsewhere in Italy increased the corresponding 2025 total to $1.084 billion.

These values include temporarily imported material and are not the sale value of aircraft assembled at Cameri, but they quantify the volume of components moving through the Italian node. Leonardo had 1,079 personnel directly assigned to the F-35 program at Cameri at the end of 2025, which places the 19 aircraft completed that year alongside a much larger workload in structures, test activity, logistics, and sustainment. The maintenance expansion is more important for Cameri’s workload after 2030 than the current annual aircraft production figures. Italy was selected in 2014 to host European F-35 heavy-airframe maintenance; Cameri achieved Initial Depot Capability in 2019 and reached full operational capability for overhaul work in June 2022.

Therefore, home bases handle the F-35's routine servicing, normal inspections, component changes, and flight-line work, whereas Cameri can conduct prolonged structural inspections, airframe repairs, major modifications, replacement of components, and upgrade packages that require specialized fixtures, engineering support, as well as extended aircraft downtime. The original facility contained five heavy-maintenance bays. That number increased to 13 by 2025, 160% above the original capacity, and is scheduled to reach 21 by 2029, which is another 61.5% increase from 13 and a 320% increase compared with the initial five-bay configuration. Norway provides a practical measure of how quickly such capacity can be consumed. Its first F-35 entered Cameri on July 4, 2022, after accumulating nearly 1,000 flight hours, and an individual heavy-maintenance visit could require roughly six months depending on structural work.

Norway is expected to have roughly one aircraft continuously undergoing maintenance there. If a six-month residence were representative, one bay could theoretically process two aircraft per year and 21 bays could process 42, before accounting for longer work packages, waiting for parts, engineering holds, or overlapping modifications. An eight-month average would reduce theoretical throughput to 31.5 aircraft annually, while a 12-month average would reduce it to 21. Cameri has already moved beyond supporting Italian and Norwegian fleets. On March 24, 2025, the 19-5475, a U.S. Air Force F-35A of the 495th Fighter Squadron, 48th Fighter Wing, based at RAF Lakenheath in the United Kingdom, entered Cameri for planned depot maintenance and became the first USAFE F-35 inducted into an overseas regional depot. That event established that an American fighter permanently based in Europe could undergo deep airframe work in Italy rather than being automatically returned across the Atlantic.

Propulsion support has also moved closer to the depot. In January 2022, personnel from the Italian Air Force, Pratt & Whitney, and Leonardo replaced an engine module on the AL-007, an Italian F-35A,  at Cameri, allowing that intervention to be performed without removing and shipping the entire F135 propulsion system. The potential customer base is now much larger than the Italian inventory. Germany is acquiring 35 F-35As for roughly €10 billion, Poland 32, and Switzerland roughly 30, meaning those three fleets alone represent about 97 aircraft. Adding Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Finland, and the Czech Republic brings the European population into the several-hundred-aircraft range before permanently based U.S. aircraft are counted. This changes the industrial mathematics. Final assembly is performed once, but every operational aircraft accumulates flight hours, fatigue, configuration changes, and upgrade requirements repeatedly.

If ten fleets each generated only one six-month heavy-airframe induction per year, those ten aircraft alone would continuously occupy five bays. Two inductions per fleet per year would occupy ten. Major modification campaigns applied simultaneously across several national fleets could raise demand faster because they would generate scheduled depot work independently of accident repairs or unexpected structural findings. Cameri’s 21-bay target therefore reflects a sustainment problem that scales with the installed European fleet, not with the number of aircraft Italy itself owns. Still, Switzerland will face that sustainment problem with a smaller fleet than originally planned. The September 2022 agreement covered 36 F-35As for CHF 6.035 billion under the Air2030 fighter replacement programme, after the September 27, 2020 referendum approved a CHF 6 billion ceiling indexed from January 2018.

By the end of 2025, that indexed ceiling had increased to CHF 6.429 billion, but maintaining all 36 aircraft was subsequently calculated to require about CHF 1.1 billion in additional financing. The Federal Council decided on March 6, 2026, to work toward about 30 aircraft and request CHF 394 million in supplementary credit for inflation and other increases rather than seek the larger amount required to preserve all 36. The precise final quantity remains dependent on U.S. negotiations with Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney for future production lots and F135 engines, with Switzerland intending to communicate the number by the second quarter of 2027 so that production positions can be secured. Moving from 36 to 30 reduces the planned inventory by six fighters, or 16.7%.

The effect on force management is larger than the simple removal of six tails because every training aircraft, aircraft in scheduled maintenance, and aircraft unavailable because of unscheduled work then consume a greater fraction of the Swiss F-35 force. One aircraft equals 2.78% of a 36-aircraft fleet but 3.33% of a 30-aircraft fleet, a 20% increase in the share of total inventory represented by each airframe. At an illustrative 70% availability level, 36 aircraft produce 25.2 available aircraft while 30 produce 21; at 60%, the respective figures are 21.6 and 18. These percentages are not Swiss mission-capable forecasts, but they show why depot turnaround and maintenance reliability become more consequential as the fleet contracts.

Furthermore, Switzerland’s earlier force-planning requirement of 55 to 70 modern fighters also provides scale: 30 F-35As would equal 54.5% of the lower figure and 42.9% of the upper figure, while the original 36 would have represented 65.5% and 51.4%. During the transitional period, the Swiss Air Force must also maintain the F/A-18C/D as the operational bridge. Switzerland allocated CHF 450 million to extend the Hornet fleet, including structural work completed in April 2026 that permits all 30 Swiss F/A-18C/Ds to reach roughly 6,000 flight hours per aircraft, alongside communications, navigation, identification, mission-software, planning-system, and simulator modifications.

The result is several years of overlapping expenditure and manpower demand: Hornet air policing and readiness, F-35 conversion in Arkansas, infrastructure conversion at three Swiss bases, weapons and logistics acquisition, pilot generation and the gradual movement of maintenance personnel from one fighter type to another. Cameri can shorten the geographic distance to heavy industrial support because the facility lies about 40 km from Switzerland, but it does not create a self-contained Swiss or European production chain. J-6004’s own itinerary makes that clear: an Italian-manufactured fuselage-and-wing structure will cross the Atlantic for integration in Texas before the aircraft returns to Europe, and in later service the same fighter may return to Cameri for structural maintenance or modifications. With six fewer aircraft than originally planned, the effectiveness of that system will increasingly be measured in concrete availability terms: how many of the roughly 30 F-35A fighters remain available at any given time for Swiss air policing and air defense tasks.

Written by Jérôme Brahy

Jérôme Brahy is a defense analyst and documentalist at Army Recognition. He specializes in naval modernization, aviation, drones, armored vehicles, and artillery, with a focus on strategic developments in the United States, China, Ukraine, Russia, Türkiye, and Belgium. His analyses go beyond the facts, providing context, identifying key actors, and explaining why defense news matters on a global scale.

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