Actually from all the madness they did truly make the best stovl fighter ever. Boy was it expensive, though. It is a stealthy box with wings and it is only saved by the incredible tech inside of it. Problem is even the various powerful electronics are still buggy as hell. Of course engineers have done some amazing work trying to fix so many problems and it is a force to be reckoned with but imo it is ultimately a failure of corporate greed and narrow minded ideology. They should have built one common omnirole stealth fighter for navy and airforce and made a completely different stovl fighter for the marines.
F-35 Lightning II: News thread
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
Actually from all the madness they did truly make the best stovl fighter ever. Boy was it expensive, though. It is a stealthy box with wings and it is only saved by the incredible tech inside of it. Problem is even the various powerful electronics are still buggy as hell. Of course engineers have done some amazing work trying to fix so many problems and it is a force to be reckoned with but imo it is ultimately a failure of corporate greed and narrow minded ideology. They should have built one common omnirole stealth fighter for navy and airforce and made a completely different stovl fighter for the marines.
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
Airbornewolf wrote:in my personal opinion, the F-35 is an flying turd. and it always will be.
It is unsuitable for combat, and only serves to make money by western arms manufacturers.
the only way the pilots survive any engagement with other figher aircraft, is by ejecting from their aircraft.
"but its stealth!".
Yeah.....about that......
how do you think all that rust will affect stealth?.
I swear, every single news outlet of "you know what type" would have gone absolute apeshit if even a fraction of this rust appeared on the Su-57.
Like, people were petty enough to look for individual rivets, and to name the one crash it had in its ten years flying as a failure.
Oh the double standards.
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
According to a Government Accountability Office report, it cost the Air Force in 2020 about $7.8 million to fly one of its F-35As. That was nearly double the service’s $4.1 million goal.
One of the Navy’s F-35Cs, the aircraft carrier variant, cost $9.9 million to fly in 2020 — more than the $7.5 million goal. For a single Marine Corps F-35B, the short-takeoff-and-vertical-landing variant, the cost came to $9.1 million that year; and for one F-35C, the bill came to $7.9 million. The Corps’ cost goals for both variants are $6.8 million each.
Lockheed also said that newer F-35s are more reliable than older versions thanks to the maturation of design and production processes. A newer F-35 typically flies for 14 total hours before a failure occurs, whereas models produced during the early days of low-rate initial production tend to experience a failure after four to six flight hours.
Full article below.
https://www.defensenews.com/air/2022/09/01/lockheed-pentagon-claim-theyre-reining-in-f-35-sustainment-costs/
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
A while back I think it was Norway that was worried that the high cost of flight hours meant air crew were not getting enough hours on the planes to remain proficient, meaning more money would need to be spent to get their flight hours up to acceptable levels so they can retain a level of competency to continue flying the aircraft.
The best thing for Russia would be if every HATO country had hundreds of these aircraft... the economic damage they do would be catastrophic.
Would add that the sophisticated supply system that was going to manage every ones spare parts pools and trade in parts was declared too complex and was cancelled.
Yak really sold them a dog when they sold engine nozzle technology for the VSTOL version... without that model it would have been much cheaper and simpler and they would have had more flexibility in the shape enabling them to make a more F-16 like fighter.
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
By Bridger Beal-Cvetko, KSL.com and Ashley Moser, KSL-TV | Updated - Oct. 20, 2022 at 11:33 a.m. | Posted - Oct. 19, 2022 at 7:06 p.m.
https://www.an.no/kampfly-matte-nodlande-i-bodo/s/5-4-1690156
Combat aircraft had to make an emergency landing in Bodø
Open split buttons for the article
01.12.22 15:17
Christian A. Unosen
An F35 fighter jet had to make an emergency landing at Bodø airport on Thursday, reported VG newspaper.
Distress signals were sent out just before 2 p.m., the newspaper reported.
Two other planes that were going to land in Bodø had to circle around Meløy, a tipster tells VG.
Communications Manager in the Air Force, Eivind Byre, confirmed the incident to the newspaper. He says that the fighter plane was on its way from Ørland Air Station to Evenes when the situation arose.
"The fighter plane received an error message on the system and made a controlled emergency landing in Bodø just before 2 p.m.," he told the newspaper, adding that the F-35 landed without drama.
The error message is currently being investigated, according to Byre.
Also yes two F-35 mishaps happened on the same day.
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1Z_DuF87Sc
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
The F-35 will do more damage to the US and HATO than any single action Russia might decide on... I hope they end up buying thousands...
It didn't of course start with the F-35... as he mentions the F-15 was the same... I seem to remember a congressman complaining about the enormous cost of the F-15... he famously said something along the lines of... this country will never again buy a 20 million dollar fighter aircraft... which turned out to be true... no US fighter since has been that cheap...
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
This isnt funny anymore this is just sad
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
VTOL aircraft are crash prone in general.
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
White elephants... especially when you consider they can't just land anywhere... low altitude hovering over an open grassy field and those jet engines blast furrows in the ground you could use to plant potatoes.... assuming you remain high enough to avoid that dirt entering your air intakes... no way you could possible touch down though.
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
Su-27 following an F-35. Luneburg lenses seem present on the aircraft.
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
Also I was wondering if when Russians do flybys of f-35 fighters if they could get some portable hand held radar or sensor to beam directly on parts of the stealth skin, bypassing the luneberg lenses to study it.
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
The L band wavelength is too long so the entire aircraft would reflect the signal so its shape is not important to the reflection anymore and all the shaping techniques to redirect energy directed at it will have no effect.
It is like turning it into sonar... you lose definition and detail of what they target is like and merely get a pulse to tell you it is there.
If your high frequency radar sets show nothing or something tiny like a marble but your L band radar detects something there that is substantial then you know there is a stealth aircraft there and you should look with your IRST or use a very high energy pulse with your high frequency radar.
With NEBO they go further and actually take the high and lower frequency signals and process them for all the information detail they can get and combine the results to gather more information about the target than either radar could get on their own separately.
It is all actually quite clever... not that the west would give them any credit... they are probably copying german WWII radar technology or some such rubbish...
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
Home
Military & Defense
Ongoing headaches with F-35 fighter jets are rippling through the rest of the US military's combat aircraft fleet
Michael Peck
Jan 12, 2023, 6:09 PM
The F-35 program has been plagued by years of delays, cost overruns, and technical glitches.
Those problems have prompted the Pentagon to extend the service lives of older combat jets.
Extensions keep jets flying but don't guarantee they will meet future needs, a government watchdog says.
Years of delays, cost overruns, and technical glitches with the F-35 have put the Pentagon in a dilemma.
If F-35s aren't fit to fly in sufficient numbers, then older aircraft such as the F-16 must be kept in service to fill the gap. In turn, having to extend the lifespan of older planes consumes money that could be used to acquire new aircraft and results in aging warplanes that may not be capable of fulfilling their missions on the current battlefield.
"While service life extension programs are one way to keep current aircraft capable and in operation, they do not guarantee that those aircraft will be available when needed or that they will possess required capabilities to meet future needs," the Government Accountability Office warned in a new report on US tactical aircraft.
The F-35 is meant to be the backbone of the US Air Force, Navy, and Marine fighter fleets, replacing several types of Cold War-era fighters and attack aircraft, including Navy and Marine F/A-18 C/Ds, Marine AV-8Bs, Air Force A-10s, and, most importantly, Air Force F-16s, which are the US's most numerous fighters.
Despite making its first flight in 2006, the F-35 — which costs about $100 million apiece — still hasn't been approved for full-rate production and remains in limited procurement.
The aircraft has been plagued by a seemingly endless series of bugs, including problems with its stealth coating, sustained supersonic flight, helmet-mounted display, excessive vibration from its cannon, and even vulnerability to being hit by lightning.
The military and Lockheed Martin have resolved some of those problems, but the cumulative effect of the delays is that the Air Force has had to shelve plans for the F-35 to replace the F-16, which now will keep flying until the 2040s.
"Over the last decade the Air Force and Navy have funded service life extension programs for F-16s and F/A-18 A-Ds — both originally expected to be replaced by F-35 — to address fatigue of structural components and keep the aircraft capable and in operation," the GAO report said.
The remarkable longevity of some aircraft — such as the 71-year-old B-52 bomber or the 41-year-old A-10 — tends to obscure the difficulty of keeping old warplanes flying. Production lines are usually shut down, and the original manufacturers of components and spare parts have long ceased production. In some cases, they are no longer in business.
Russia's air force has been mocked for poor maintenance that has undercut its airpower in the Ukraine war. But the US military has also long suffered from major readiness shortfalls, as have NATO nations such as Germany. In 2020, fewer than 10 of the Luftwaffe's Typhoon fighters were operational.
Particularly troubling was a November 2022 GAO study that analyzed readiness of 49 US military aircraft models between 2011 and 2021.
"Only four aircraft types, none of which were fixed-wing fighter aircraft, met their annual mission capable goals in a majority of those years," the watchdog warned.
To some extent, this problem afflicts all modern military hardware. Complex weapons — whether fighters, tanks, or aircraft carriers — seem prone to reliability and maintenance issues or to shortages of specialized and expensive spare parts.
But the F-35 has become the poster child for aircraft readiness woes. An April 2022 GAO report blamed that on a lack of spare parts, a lack of maintenance equipment, and on ground crews lacking the technical data they needed to maintain the aircraft.
The stakes are high. The Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps together plan to spend $20.2 billion a year for tactical aircraft development and procurement between now and 2027.
But the services are trying to allocate those funds between three competing needs: adequate numbers of aircraft and capabilities in the near-term, ongoing affordability issues, and preparing for future needs.
The Air Force's proposed 2023 budget already calls for delaying acquisition of 66 F-35s originally scheduled for 2023 until 2027, while the Navy is buying 31 fewer F-35s and delaying a service-life extension for the F-18E/F Super Hornet.
The GAO urged the Department of Defense to conduct a comprehensive assessment of its investments in tactical aircraft, including risk analysis and how the various aircraft programs depend on each other. But whatever happens, US airpower will be diminished until the F-35 is fully fixed.
EDIT
Link added
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-106375
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- Post n°745
Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
If F-35s aren't fit to fly in sufficient numbers, then older aircraft such as the F-16 must be kept in service to fill the gap. In turn, having to extend the lifespan of older planes consumes money that could be used to acquire new aircraft and results in aging warplanes that may not be capable of fulfilling their missions on the current battlefield.
Hahaha... does Michael Peck work for the companies making F-35s?
The problem is not that the aging aircraft might not be capable of performing the missions needed, the real threat is that the aging aircraft might perform current missions faster easier and cheaper than the new Super Dooper F-35s could manage if they were even working properly and to spec.
The reality is that the F-35s can't perform their current missions which is why they are not buying them to replace the older aircraft on schedule so spending money on keeping the old planes working is actually money very well spent because the old planes got the job done for a fraction of the cost of the newer stealthier types.
Stealth has costs and that includes applying coatings and checking they are working as advertised, which takes time and money and suitable facilities that are not present on any military front line base... it is why the Russians haven't cancelled all 4th gen fighter production for 5th like the west seems so set on doing.
4th gen aircraft can be fitted with all the electronics and systems a 5th gen aircraft has, the only difference is stealth... 5th gen has stealth built in and 4th gen has about 20% stealth added on so it is never going to be as stealthy as a real steal aircraft because it carries its weapons externally which will always make it non stealthy.
But it can be faster and much much cheaper and it can carry rather more ordinance on far more external weapon pylons than a stealth aircraft in stealth mode.
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
Read this in utter disbelief, here are a couple of sample paras to wet your appetite. Note my highlights, first they knew about this very, very early on, second they know in advance that Block 4 has a real problem.
As I commented in the thread, what on earth do the foreign customers think of this debacle? Stitched up is too good a phrase.
the head of the F-35 JPO (Joint Program Office) provided additional details on exactly what this means.
"The original program engine specification allocated 15 kW [kilowatts] of bleed air extraction to support system cooling requirements, and the F135 engine was designed, tested, and qualified to this specification with a level of margin available for future growth," Schmidt wrote. "During the final stages of initial aircraft development, air vehicle cooling requirements grew to exceed planned bleed air extraction."
"To provide the necessary bleed air, the engine is required to run hotter, and the program is realizing the effects of this through an increase in operating temperature, and a decrease in engine life, which is driving earlier depot inductions and an increase in lifecycle cost," the written testimony adds.
So, "I also have a derived requirement for power and thermal management, because I'm running out of power at the end of Block 4," Schmidt added when actually speaking during the hearing.
"Without upgrades, the addition of Block 4 capabilities will further degrade engine life and increase program lifecycle costs, because while the current TR-2 and TR-3 aircraft have sufficient cooling and power (while impacting the engine life as stated above), capabilities in Block 4 and beyond will increase cooling and power demands beyond current capabilities of the air system," he elaborated in his written remarks.
The three main F-35 variants are each powered by a different F135 sub-variant. The F135-PW-400 on the carrier-based F-35C differs from the F135-PW-100 in the F-35A primarily in its use of corrosion-resistant materials that are better suited to operations at sea. The short and vertical takeoff and landing-capable F-35B uses the F135-PW-600, which features an articulating exhaust nozzle and other features necessary to connect it to the large lift fan in the forward fuselage on that version.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/f-35-engine-running-too-hot-due-to-under-speccing-upgrade-now-vital
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- Post n°747
Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
You have to admit one thing about the US political system, it can expose issues regardless of their impact in public, not kept hidden.
Exposing problems they knew about for years and also actually doing nothing about it is actually part of the corruption... let them make a bit more money before we call them on the fact that their product does not work despite repeatedly spending extra money to fix problems we found and they ignored till we pointed them out...
As I commented in the thread, what on earth do the foreign customers think of this debacle? Stitched up is too good a phrase.
Who cares what they think... like they get any say at all in any American military programme... they just buy what they are told to buy at massively inflated prices and servicing and support costs.
You would think if the specs for cooling air are changed then the specs for engine upgrades to meet and exceed those requirements would be the first thing you do, or perhaps set up some other back up and supporting air cooling system... the Su-57 has air intakes on the inner edge of their vertical fins for example.
It seems western engineers have become incapable of redesigning and also that the F-35 is not really in full serial production yet despite having over 500 produced... it is the Microsoft Windows of aircraft and the air forces of the west are doing the beta testing and paying for everything too.
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
Spriter
@Spriter99880
CEO of Iran Electronics Industries in an interview with Tasnim:
We have digital scanners for enemy electronic equipment, for example, if the radar of an F-35 fighter starts working, it emits waves different from the radar of another F-35, and today we are able to distinguish them.
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
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Re: F-35 Lightning II: News thread
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