F-35 Lightning II: News thread

"Hey remember McNamara's crazy attempt at third gen fighter-bomber commonality that made a super high tech naval failure and a somewhat successful yet buggy and dangerous airforce bomber? Well let's do it again but this time add ridiculous marine stovl requirements! Yeah the best electronic suite money can buy combined to fit into an angular box with wings!"

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.

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.

I knew it was shit, but after reading this it's even more shit than I thought. Oh how so many countries will be regretting buying this heap of crap and money guzzler. A few key points from the article.

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/

Someone flies this things? You are not supposed to. Keep it in the hangar, show it to presstitutes from time to time. That´s it. 

Stop this propaganda targeting Uebermanschliche F-35 at obce, you agent od Putin, you!! 🤭

Interesting take on F35 by the lead engineer behind F16 and A10. Spoiler: total crap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1Z_DuF87Sc

VSTOL version working just fine. 

Upgrades radar with the su-57m project.

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.

Another tale of woe. This time from Business Insider


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

You have to admit one thing about the US political system, it can expose issues regardless of their impact in public, not kept hidden. This is a prime example. Some here winge about The Drive but they nailed this one.

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

Not just not invisible but uniquely identifiable it seems

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.