Is The F-35 Strike Fighter The Military Chevy Volt?

Investor's Business Daily ^ | February 27, 2012 | IBD staff

[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.

[DoughtyOne]

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.

[DoughtyOne]

Sorry for the duplication. I’m getting a strange sign-in pop up when I post.

[DoughtyOne]

Oh great. Thanks.

[Yo-Yo]

Any breach would initiate an auto-destruct

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.

[DoughtyOne]

Your C-5 scenario was fine.  The ability to fly in a fleet of additional aircraft would be good.

If anyone's comment was bad, it was mine with this doozie, "Trouble is, is it practical to launch 1000 unmanned aircraft if you can’t recover them, bring them back to base?"  Okay, I'm going to go sit in the corner the rest of the day...  Out of self-interest I should allow you to think your C-5 comment caused this response.  It didn't.

The range of the X-47b is 2,100 miles. ? PDF  If our aircraft can leave the carrier battle group and hit their targets, land based drones could easily go out to the carrier group, conduct business, and return to base.  It was silly of me to address the drone as if it couldn't do this.  That one should go in my permanent personnel file.  ;^)

Imagine being able to station 900 miles off the coast of an adversarial nation, fly in the X-47b, do your business, and return the aircraft to the carrier battle group.  Nice!

I may be too much of a relic.  My gutt still says we need the F22.  You having agreed that we should extend the production, we're pretty much in agreement.  I'm not against the unmanned aircraft in total.  It's a fact they've been quite useful to us even at this stage of development.  What comes next, is anyone's guess, but the future does look bright.

I'm not quite as sure that they will as easily replace the traditional fighter, but we'll see.  They may in fact do so.  That's why I still support more F22s, but probably not the orginal figure.  By the end of their life span, we'll undoubtedly have something far superior, unless our nation implodes first.

I can easily see them (unmanned aircraft) conducting long range bombing missions.  It would seem to me that they could become the go-to choice for loitering off station for hours or days, with a nuclear deterent. ? records ? page bottom

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.

I think that's a reasonble assumption.

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.

I have concerns about what took place with the aircraft downed in Iran.  There must not be a broad vulnerability or more aircraft would have been downed, and our fleet would be grounded.  It's still very troubling that we didn't think it necessary to destroy this aircraft.  I do not want to see China gifted this technology.

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.

I like your premise.  The Iran downing leaves me wondering how close to this model we are actually incorporating into our equipment.

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 admit that when it comes to the private sector corporations/contractors it does look like the costs are elevated to facilitate a better bottom line.

This is an industry that I don't attempt to second guess though.  The R&D, trouble shooting, and span of project involved, leaves me woefully inadequate to address with certainty what's really taking place.  It is easily discrenable that the costs look much worse when you do all the R&D, you begin manufacturing, and the government pulls the legs out before production is completed.  The R&D takes a long time.  Over those years, a lot of funds are spent.  Then as the numbers of aircraft roll of the line, the cost per unit declines.  Spread that cost for180 aircraft and it's bound to be a lot more than if we ran a full 800 unit production.

It also bothers me when we destroy all that tooling so it's harder to restart production.  It also bothers me to think that aviation companies may find the federal government to be such a bad business partner that they would simply refuse to be a part of the process for future aircraft.  If we truly do stop all F22 production, destroy our tooling, it will be thirty years before we have another aircraft of this complexity and value.  It's possible we never could.  The stepping stone aspects of building on from here are also immeasurably damaged.  Knowledge base vaporizes as people in the know move on or retire.

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.

I'll admit to giving that some thought while developing my prior comments.

 - - - - - - -

I know you understand all this, but for conversation's sake I include it for those who don't.

[magslinger]

Daring young drone on the flying trapeze?

This isn't new tech.

[DoughtyOne]

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.

[Carry_Okie]

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... Lift disappears when you transition from 150 to 250 mph exterior wind flow, to 5 to 10 mph interior atmosphere.

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.

[DoughtyOne]

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.

[Carry_Okie]

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.

Exactly what I was thinking. Make a carburetor throat out of it.

[DoughtyOne]

There you go...

[Carry_Okie]

I'm not thinking a solid conveyor either, but some sort of belt made of plastic coated cable netting. It would soften the vortex turbulence too. One could even taper the end and spread it as it comes back to the plane. Lots of drag, but I'd bet that wouldn't bother a C-5.

My point in saying "C-5" at all was to say effectively "a really big cargo plane." Your analogy of "flying aircraft carrier" was exactly it, with the fighter planes being drones with folding wings. Imagine the fighting range of such a system! It might take on a small air force in a matter of hours. I don't know how much heavier a seaplane version would be, but one could then refuel the "aircraft carrier" from a ship tanker, making it a mobile air force that could be sustained for weeks to months. Want stealth with soft armor? Make the tanker a shallow sub. With fuel inside to moderate the pressure difference, the tank might possibly be a towable bag. Tow it with a submarine tug?

Fun stuff.

[DoughtyOne]

Yes, fun stuff indeed. Wouldn’t you love to be involved with a think thank that came up with these ideas, presented them, and saw them come to fruition? I would.

[DoughtyOne]

BTW, your additional ideas were interesting too.