There were a lot of people who thought the F35 was a turkey. Including this guy.
Posted on 02/27/2012 4:54:12 PM PST by raptor22
Defense: Pilots who arrived a year ago to train on the fighter of the future are still waiting as safety concerns, cost overruns and questions about the whole program's feasibility mount.
The F-35 is meant to be America's next-generation fighter, the heir to the Air Force's F-15 Eagle and the Navy's and Marines' F/A-18 Hornet. Those two aircraft have fulfilled their air superiority and ground-attack roles well, yet many are well beyond their expected life expectancy.
The F-35 would fill America's defense needs in an age of budget constraints, we were told. So far it has not been a smooth takeoff.
About 35 of the best fighter pilots from the Air Force, Marines and Navy who arrived in the Florida Panhandle last year to learn to fly the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter are still waiting. They've been limited to occasionally taxying them and firing up the engines.
Otherwise, their training is limited to three F-35 flight simulators, classroom work and flights in older-model jets. Only a handful of pilots get to fly the F-35s.
Concerns have arisen, ranging from improperly installed parachutes under the pilots' ejector seats to whether the aircraft have been adequately tested.
Production has been slow and delayed, and the cost has risen from $233 billion to $385 billion. Only 43 F-35s have been built, and an additional 2,443 have been ordered by the Pentagon.
Part of the problem is that the F-35 is a one-size-fits-all aircraft designed to fit roles from taking off a carrier's deck to hovering and landing in a confined space on a foreign battlefield. It's meant to be a ground-attack and air-superiority fighter. The question is whether it can adequately be both.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
I don’t know of any new aircraft rollout that hasn’t been plagued by problems. Somehow we manage to get them in the air.
When they cancelled the F22, they touted the F35 up the ying yang. At the time I said the F35 would be cancelled in time too. A lot of folks told me I was crazy.
Well, how crazy am I looking these days.
We should never have listened on the F22. It should still be in production today.
If there is a car equivalent, I’d say it’s more like the Edsel.
Nice, shiny, and complicated.
Exactly right. We never seem to learn that there are people out there that will ALWAYS find trouble with EVERY piece of military equipment.
IMHO, "next generation" should have been an X-29 style drone. The plane could cost 1/10 as much (when one considers the total logistical cost of piloted aircraft, including training, medical care, retirement, S&R infrastructure) and could pull Gs that would kill an F-35 pilot. Lighter, faster, more maneuverable and more easily mass produced.
You got that right. The F-22 is the finest air superiority fighter in the world. There arem’t enough of them unfortunately.
Defense ping
Agreed, even if you could somehow null out inertia
the future of military aviation is unmanned.
Nice to see you, by the way.
The F-22 should never have been cancelled, but I believe the F-35 will eventually turn out well, though more expensive than it should be.
I keep in mind the Abrams tank. Remember how absolutely vilified that tank was when it was being developed and built in the Seventies? The libs were squalling long, hard and loud...the engine would never work right, the gun was too small, it was too complicated, it would never work in a sandy environment, etc.
Best battle tested tank in the world. But we won’t hear a peep from a single detractor. As if it all went down the memory hole. Kind of like global cooling back in the Seventies.
If all this stuff weren’t so damned serious, it would be hilarious. I do think we will rue the day we cancelled the F-22 program.
Agreed, even if you could somehow null out inertia
the future of military aviation is unmanned.
Nice to see you, by the way.
Absolutely right, on both counts.
A # 1
Too few
It was never meant, nor designed to be both. Whether idiots in the DOD, the vendor or the politicians began to build it up as an air superiority option (knowing it wasn't) after the writing on the wall for the F-22 became apparent is a valid question.
Short answer, hell no.
I agree with each of your thoughts here. That omage to the global cooling is one that reminds folks that the Leftists tried to scare the crap out of us back in the 70s, because the planet was cooling.
Then they got smart (as if you could call it that) by claiming the earth was warming, so they could hit everything in sight negatively, because it was adding to global warming.
I remember those days well, because they were also demanding folks in the U. S. to stop having so many children, because the earth couldn’t sustain them.
At the time, being a young kid full of mush, I didn’t realize what a pantload that was, so my wife and I decided to limit our family to two kids. Today I would have more like six to eight.
It as all about reducing northern European ancestry influence on the United States. It worked as least in part.
Thats true,, aircraft rollouts have traditionally had bugs. But that was when we built planes from drawings with timeframes ranging from 6 months to 2 years.
The F-35 has been in one sort of development or another for almost 20 years.
The thing is a moonpig, that cannot outrun an F-16 or F-15.
It carries smaller loads, shorter distances. It carries fewer weapons. It is FAR slower than offerings from Europe and Russia. It’s supposedly better than average in stealth and computers,, but any advantages there gave us a few years at best. The rest of the world is living and breathing electronics and programming.
This thing is a monument to political procurement and it’s hard to believe this is the best our country can roll out.
It was always a weak sister,,,justified by the F-22s existence. Of course,, we are left with this as the main event.
Carriers with nothing but these (assuming they ever make the stealth tailhook work) are going to have less power projection than our carriers have ever fielded in the modern era.
Im waiting for the “D” model,,hoping they put a bubble canopy on it. They say that improvement worked well on Mustangs and Spitfires.
How soon we forget the long, troubled, and cost-overrun plagued developement of the F-22.
ping
There were a lot of people who thought the F35 was a turkey. Including this guy.
You stick to SMEAC and leave tactical aviation to those in the know.
More on that. Imagine a dozen C-5's, each carrying a load of drones that turn so fast they'd kill a pilot, compared to one F-35.
I hear you.
The next GOP president (although Romney's double win yesterday makes that look like a very distant, if-ever, event) needs to reopen the F-22 assembly lines and start cranking out a new generation of fleet air arm mounts as well, to replace the missing F-14.
Okay, everybody -- there it is. Word has come down.
Everybody OFF THE THREAD ..... certified TACAIR experts only!
Everyone exit by the yellow door, please.
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Well, the F35 has been asked to do quite a bit. I don’t know a lot about it, but in time it may be a great aircraft for what it was designed to do.
That still doesn’t mean the F22 wasn’t needed.
I know you weren’t trying to make that point, and I appreciate you mentioning McInerney was not a big F35 fan. I’d like to think he’s wrong, but he may be dead on target.
Carry_Okie, I like your thoughts on this. I’m not immune to the argument for unmanned aircraft. I am still not convinced you ever do away with all fighter aircraft.
I may be proven wrong on that point over time. And if I am, the F22 and F35 would be obsolete in short order.
There are a number of critical aspects of fighter aircraft and the roles they are asked to fulfill, their antagonists, and countermeasures to both that will have to be studied at length before a determination can be made.
Filling the air with hundreds of our manned aircraft while thousands of unmanned aircraft are launched against them sounds like a real buzz-kill for the manned aircraft. Trouble is, is it practical to launch 1000 unmanned aircraft if you can’t recover them, bring them back to base?
Yes G forces are not as big a threat to unmanned craft. Does that mean that weaknesses won’t be exploited to make unmanned aircraft a pipe dream that is defeated just as it’s promise is about to be realized?
Will our sleuths devise a way to take command of unmanned aircraft away from their owners, or will they find ways to commandeer ours?
In the short term, I don’t think we commit either direction. We keep adequate forces of conventional aircraft, and seek to develop the umanned aircraft to their full potential.
I will say, that if we put our eggs in the unmanned basked, and the command and control is compromised, we’re essentially defenseless in a matter of hours.
Talk about your doomsday scenario...
I agree. I might not roll out as many as we originally ordered, but I would sure roll out a lot more than we currently have.
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Any engineering involves trade offs. If you want a maneuverable bird, there goes the stability. You want armor? There goes the speed, rate of climb and ceiling. Kick it the butt harder. You just lost range. More fuel? Back to the loss of speed. I think they are trying to make the F-35 do too much. A fairer automotive comparison would be to call it a family sports pickup. Think of how poor it would be at all three tasks not to mention the dismal fuel economy.
Too many tradeoffs, too many compromises.....it was painful....ugh. There is a dvd on the painful project's development.
A competition between Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Fun to watch if you're an aerospace engineer
A 450 lb battery used to store the equivalent of a gallon of gas worth of energy. It doesn’t pass the laugh test.
I just meant that it would fulfill it’s basic mission, something I highly doubt of the F-35. I did not mean the Volt is a good vehicle or that it’s flimsy butt has any business on a highway where even a minor altercation with an original VW Bug would put it badly in second place.
I was adding the C-5 scenario to drive out-of-the-box thinking. Obviously drones land now and would have longer range if they didn't have to carry all that weight to support the pilot. Still, if a pilot can land on a carrier deck, I don't think it impossible to land a plane into a C-5 in a manner analogous to parachute jumping or aerial refueling.
It's doable. The combination of speed and maneuverability those birds would have would make the current (and possibly then some) generation of enemy A2A missiles practically useless.
Does that mean that weaknesses won’t be exploited to make unmanned aircraft a pipe dream that is defeated just as it’s promise is about to be realized?
I don't understand the question.
Will our sleuths devise a way to take command of unmanned aircraft away from their owners, or will they find ways to commandeer ours?
With spread spectrum communications, that would be truly difficult. Think of it this way (and I was thinking this in 1985): one could load a random frequency switching sequence from the launcher. NOBODY would know that sequence in advance. The enemy would have to acquire it in-flight or from the actual system that generated the sequence at launch (which could be shared in drabs should the flight extend beyond communications range), which would require them to predict the future of a random number sequence. Any breach would initiate an auto-destruct.
In the short term, I don’t think we commit either direction. We keep adequate forces of conventional aircraft, and seek to develop the umanned aircraft to their full potential.
I like the idea of finishing off the F-22 run while we do it. The X-29 project was enough ground work to make such a drone a slam dunk, that is, unless the contractors decide to make a money pot out of it. (Can't stand those people.)
I will say, that if we put our eggs in the unmanned basked, and the command and control is compromised, we’re essentially defenseless in a matter of hours.
Talk about your doomsday scenario...
With as much fly-by-wire and target management technology we have in those birds now, practically, we're already there.
Landing into a C-5 would be a lot easier than a carrier landing. Much lower relative speed.
True, but the "shock absorber" means would be a downer in an aircraft, so to speak. Yes, I do think the system is doable and it addresses both our need for more transports and tankers. As to close combat air support, I think fighters are a poor tool. I'm a Warthog guy there.
And the number to call is BR-549.
Thanks for the mention. I should probably go out and see if I can dig up a copy.
You can watch it on netflix. It IS interesting to watch, too.
I would have a serious concern for trying to combat the air flow cast off by a C-5 aircraft, penetrating that safely to land on aboard.
Beyond that, the air flow mechanics involved with the transition of exterior to interior air flow would seem to me to make this impossible.
Lift disappears when you transition from 150 to 250 mph exterior wind flow, to 5 to 10 mph interior atmosphere.
Perhaps you folks can explain away my misgivings, but I think that would be quite difficult.
I would have a serious concern for trying to combat the air flow cast off by a C-5 aircraft, penetrating that safely to land on aboard.
Beyond that, the air flow mechanics involved with the transition of exterior to interior air flow would seem to me to make this impossible.
Lift disappears when you transition from 150 to 250 mph exterior wind flow, to 5 to 10 mph interior atmosphere.
Perhaps you folks can explain away my misgivings, but I think that would be quite difficult.
Sorry for the duplication. I’m getting a strange sign-in pop up when I post.
Oh great. Thanks.
Kewl, so for my air defense countermeasure, all I have to do is try to hack into your drones, and they self destruct?
We have air-to-air drones already. They're called AIM-120 AMMRAMs.
The Achilles' Heal to any drone is the control link. It doesn't have to be hacked. All the enemy needs to do is to jam the entire band. And especially with an air-to-air drone, your drone is a lot closer to my aircraft's ECM jammer than your drone is to your control satellite.
This isn't new tech.
That’s true, but even here there was a real difficulty in getting the hook-up idea to work. And here, the aircraft remained in an exterior direct air flow situation.
Turbulence remains a serious issue.
If I understand correctly the intention here was to fly drones into the C-5 cargo compartment. If not, please correct me. No other explanation was offered.
First of all, one could tow drones and have them hook to a powered and fueled tether much as air refueling is currently done, but second, how about dragging a conveyor? Hook on and reel in. I don't think it would take that much model shop and tunnel time to cook up a working idea.
Don't get me started on AMRAAM. Not only is there a huge difference between a rocket and a jet, but I have really bad memories about that program.
Perhaps a rigid conveyor could be devised to catch or hook-up with non human occupied aircraft. I still have a hard time seeing it, but I’m not an expert in the area.
I like thinking outside the box. The prospect of an airborne aircraft carrier is appealing. With the range of non human occupied aircraft improving significantly, the need may diminish in short order.
Here are my concerns.
1. The vortex coming off the C-5 body would be very turbulent. This would negatively affect control surfaces, causing severe buffeting and effective flight path bouncing and veering.
2. Aircraft flying into a C-5 bay would have to transition from 200 mph apx. airflow to that of a 1 to 2 mile airflow inside the vortex and bay.
3. A flexible conveyance would reel in the aircraft from outside the vortex to inside it and into the bay. All may work well until the aircraft is reeled within the vortex where wind speed drops drastically. At this point the aircraft looses lift and drops out. When it drops out, it falls below the level of the aircraft body, catching severe airflow and the resultant whipping or flapping in the winds. At that point the teather, the aircraft, and the C-5 in the vicinity of the reeled in aircraft becomes vulnerable.
4. A rigid conveyance would have to latch on to an aircraft that was being buffeted. Prior to and while hooking up, a negative impact could cause damage to the conveyor and or the trailing aircraft. If hookup could be achieved, the conveyance would be vulnerable to severe buffeting as a result of the dynamics hitting the aircraft as it was latched on and reeled in. With a heavy (relatively) body on the end of the conveyance, tremendous torquing would result.
I think it might be worthy of looking into trying to ingress aircraft from a newly created hole in the belly of the aircraft, forward enough that it would allow simultaneous activity in the back of the C-5 bay.
A leading flap might be necessary to prevent severe winds pouring into the C-5 bay.
The ‘landing’ aircraft could fly into a lowered catcher, that could grasp it and raise it into the interior.
Exactly what I was thinking. Make a carburetor throat out of it.
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