F-35 Lightning II: News thread

The hell is going on over there?
I could understand the F-35s, but what's up with the F-22, that aircraft should be solid by now, or do they just age that badly?

Planes crash... that is simply a fact of life.

Random does not mean evenly spaced every 5 to ten years... random causes for crashes can all happen on the same day and still be totally unrelated.

The F-22 is not a perfect plane by any stretch of the imagination... it is just more secret...

For high tech systems a good
understanding is needed of how the craft degrades. That is design level engineering.

More precisely before the F-22 there were no large stealth fighters, so they have no track record to learn how these things will age over time.

They just have to monitor them and try to wing it...

That's pathetic. 2 jets are worth an equiped hospital.

Even worse than that... they aren't worth a hospital, but that is how much they cost.

In reality one equipped hospital is more valuable than any number of stealth fighters...

Every pilot claims their plane is the best... and this video sponsored by the Royal Air Force suggests this guy gets paid for PR...

The more the west buys of those fighters the better off everyone else will be.... they are enormously expensive and not fit for purpose.

They will dramatically reduce the performance of HATO... in terms of range and speed and weapon capacity... in fact look at HATO forces now... most are in terrible shape because in most areas they are underfunded, so adding this white elephant means even less money will be in the pot to pay for the things they actually need... it is brilliant.

Trump says Germany doesn't pay enough into HATO... how will any of them protect themselves from Russia...

I would saying the US moving troops out of Germany and in to places like Poland and the Baltic states actually moves the cannon fodder closer to Russia so in any conflict with Russia it makes Germany less of a target (with fewer US troops) and also puts more American bodies on the line in places that are too far forward to be of any military use.

Any conflict with HATO and the Baltic States and Poland are nuked just as a matter of course... a stupid (vulnerable) place to put "targets".

Sounds like a good escape for Turkey...

Weren't the UAE funding a 5th gen fighter with Russia... perhaps Turkey could join... maybe even India too...

F-35 in "beast mode"

F-35A in "beast mode" with one AIM-9X missile launcher and six 500-lb (227 kg) laser-guided UAB GBU-12s - four under the wings and two in the armament bay (AFB Luke, Arizona) :copyright: Senior Airman Alexander Cook / USAF

In stealth mode, the F-35A can carry up to 2.6 tons of load at four points of suspension in the internal weapons compartment. But if the situation allows neglecting low visibility and flight range, with an external suspension the maximum load increases to 10 tons. This option is called "Beast Mode".

Within the framework of the so-called "allied F-35 basic course" at Luke airbase in Arizona, seven F-35A aircraft, flight and ground personnel of the Norwegian Air Force, together with their colleagues from other countries, began to practice flights in "beast mode" in order to be ready for a significant change in the characteristics of the machine that have become familiar, especially during takeoff and landing.

The Norwegian pilots have not yet erased from the memory not the most pleasant memories when they urgently had to retrain. First, before the Afghan epic in 2002, the Danes rented Sniper suspended containers for target designation of the UAB, then in 2011, before the NATO Unified Protector operation in Libya, they borrowed ALQ-131 electronic warfare containers from the Dutch, and the simultaneous transition to the use of the AIM-120 UR was not very comfortable to say the least. Just before the flight to Souda in Crete, the pilots experienced for the first time how the air behavior of the F-16 with "three-meter Amraam telephone poles on the wingtips," as one of the participating pilots later described it, changed for the first time.



https://bmpd.livejournal.com/4110787.html

You have to make it sound really cool because effectively what they are talking about is a mode in which your 120 million dollar stealth fighter is not stealthy and not a fighter and has greatly reduced range and speed and effectively is lower performing than an F-16 doing the same job... so they have to make it sound cool, or everyone will realise what over priced rubbish it is.