The F-22 Raptor (and its predecessor the F-21 Lightning) and the poor doomed to failure F-35 JSF are cool, but not beautiful.
For elegance in the sky, the F-15 will never be bested:
Posted on 04/03/2012 11:11:41 PM PDT by U-238
Boeing delivered the final two F-15K Slam Eagles to the Republic of Korea Air Force (ROKAF) on April 2 at Daegu Air Base. All ROKAF F-15Ks were delivered on cost and on schedule.
"Boeing is proud to have worked with the ROKAF to ensure that their F-15Ks included all the capability and power necessary to defend their homeland through 2040 and beyond," said Roger Besancenez, F-15 Program vice president for Boeing.
Boeing will continue to support the ROKAF fleet through the long-term, affordable Performance Based Logistics (PBL) sustainment contract the company received from the Republic of Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration in February.
The five-year PBL contract brings new opportunities to local industry, beginning with Hyundai Glovis, which is providing in-country logistics handling and supply chain distribution activities. Those opportunities continue a strong history of contributions to the F-15, including:
- Doosan DST: embedded GPS inertial navigation system - Hanwha: hydraulic and flight control actuators - Huneed Technologies: wire harnesses - Korea Aerospace Industries: wings and forward fuselage - LIG Nex 1: networking and avionics technology - Samsung Thales: electronic countermeasure and radar warning receiver components - WIA: landing gear components.
Additionally, companies such as Korean Airlines Aerospace Division have benefited indirectly through competitive work placement opportunities and other projects identified through Boeing offset programs.
And we need about 8 squadrons of this type of aircraft with all the bells and whistles for new and replacement aircraft.
Forget a few F-35s and you’ll save money.
If more countries buys the plane, the costs go down. Simple economies of scale.
The F-22 Raptor (and its predecessor the F-21 Lightning) and the poor doomed to failure F-35 JSF are cool, but not beautiful.
For elegance in the sky, the F-15 will never be bested:
I like it very much.
If you only build 183 of something, the costs will be exorbitant.
It’s supposed to cost about a billion dollars to design and produce a new car from the ground up. If a car maker only sold 183 of the car, each unit would have to cost more than $5 million to cover the development costs, even if the car was supposed to sell for $25k.
We should have built a lot more F-22s and allowed some close allies to purchase them.
Funny how they buy more numbers of a really good and well proven airplane that still has tricks up its sleeve. The 15 can be just about as stealthy as the 35 and have all the same avionics plus the look around and look through capability.
It goes further and carries more and of course it should since it is a bigger airplane with two engines that could be upgraded.
You also have the F-15 “Silent Eagle” which is an excellent plane which has stealth features which could be an option.
That’s what supporters keep saying.
But the costs keep going up, not down.
Facts are often inconvenient things.
Exactly.
Words I like seeing WRT defense contracts:
“On time, on-budget.”
The F-35 is neither, and shows no signs of ever becoming such. Every quarter that passes, it becomes more and more like the F-111 program.
The nations who want the plane are still committed to it but not as enthused as they were originally. The reason why its going up is the software problem, which I believe was discussed earlier this week. They need to get a handle on it.
Lockheed needs a good swift kick in the pants by the Air Force and HASC to get in gear.
They won’t. It isn’t possible to do so.
The F-35 is trying to be too many things to too many customers. This inflates software (and hardware) complexity, regardless of whether we’re talking of a defense project or a commercial computer system. The number of changes sought, even at this late date, are absurd.
Engineers like to say: “You can have it quick, cheap or perfect. Choose two.” In this case, they’re trying to have all three, but with the additional dimension of serving the interests of the partner nations and their requirements, as well as the joint defense contracting spread-around for the political purposes of not making it look as tho we want to enrich only American contractors on this project.
For all of these reasons and more, the costs are going to balloon through the roof.
Kill it. Kill it now, kill it dead. It’ll be the cheapest money we’ve ever spent. The cost estimates for the lifetime of the project have gone from $1.38 trillion dollars to $1.51 trillion dollars in the last year.
That’s a pretty fair chunk of change increase in just one year.
As for the partners: Their buying intentions numbers are going down, not up, from 730 a/c to 697 a/c. IOW, the projected costs are going up and the projected purchases are going down. The whole “economy of scale” argument should now be dismissed out of hand, because there is no data extant to support the idea on this project.
The issues with the project, btw, are not limited to the software. The Ahern report of last autumn identified a number of issues:
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/274217/dod-quick-look-ahern-report.pdf
The report doesn’t list software as a major issue, but does list buffet, frame fatigue life and
execution as big issues. The frame fatigue life has an interesting double-whammy: as the number of critics of the costs of this thing grow, the Lockheed/DOD people start trying to extend the useful lifetime projections of the platform... but these extensions then run up against the issues of metal fatigue in airframes, which means that in order to actually achieve such extended lifetimes, the airframes must be inspected and possibly overhauled, bringing significant back-end costs into the overall price tag of the platform.
IMO, they’re increasingly grasping at straws to keep everyone on board this white elephant.
It impressed the Norwegian Defense Minister enough to keep his end of the bargain when he saw the plane a couple weeks ago at Edwards AFB. They want 52 planes and 4 training planes.They want them as soon as possible.
http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/norway-strengthens-plan-to-acquire-best-value-f-35-369885/
That’s nice.
Won’t change the outcome tho.
>>(F-35) Kill it. Kill it now, kill it dead.<<
Thank God someone else sees how mission creep has destroyed what was, in the beginning, a heck of a good idea. I was an enthusiastic supporter of the JSF back when but I saw the costs going up and capabilities going down, almost 1:1 and could read the writing on the wall.
But here at FR there are many still lulled by the 35’s cool tech.
Price/performance is now soundly owned by the new F-16/18 variants, and no craft have defeated the F-15 in head to head (although the simulations have been tough for it).
Now the death of the F-22 keeps me scratching my head. It really is a game changer but since it isn’t part of a ring-around-the-rosy kumbaya partnership with our enemies at the UN, it was scrapped...(?)
Too many conservatives think that ANY cut on defense strips them of their “conservative credentials.”
Wrong.
There are some programs that are just plain stupid. Talk to vets and they’ll tell you tales of fraud, waste and abuse that costs us tens to hundreds of millions of dollars - for each incident or program they talk about.
If we’re going to get the budget deficits under control, we have to admit that cutting waste and fraud will include cutting the DOD’s budget. By hundreds of billions of dollars... per year.
I do not think that congressmen/women would like jobs being lost the loss of this plane.
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