The F-35: Flying Symbol of Out of Control Bureaucracy

Why??? The Hornet outperforms them all; has greater payload and range capability, and the Navy has a well-developed training, aircraft maintenance and test infrastructure to support them.

Same problem the ME 262 had towards the end of WW-II, it was always facing bunches of P51's and the 262 wasn't faster than bullets.

We are planning to build more than 2000

The European designs have those canards in the front that are supposed to let them do much tighter turns at low speeds.

I was thinking that a mix of Super Hornets with the European planes would be much better than a mix of Super Hornets and F-35s.

I suppose the Navy could survive with Super Hornets alone, but a mix of planes allows different designs to complement each other with their own unique strengths.

Canards are indeed currently fashonable among European designers. They have some minor advantages, but in an era of fly by wire, computer guided aircraft control systems, there are easier, more efficient waysd of achieving the same advantages. Both the new F-18 and the F 35 incorporate these features.

The European asircraft you cited don't incorporate stealth technology as does the F-35. They would merely be less capable replacements for F-18s.

A very vague and unsupported conjecture at best. Please list the Unique strengths you believe are involved here and indicate how they could be complimentary.

I believe you lack an understanding of the operating environment for military aviation, and carrier aviation in particular.

There are many tradeoffs involved and introducing the added complexity of multiple, redundant aircraft types, manufacturers and sources of non interchangable replacement parts, plus the added training requirements is a big disadvantage. To do so without a meaningful significant advantage wouold be folly.

oralloy wrote:

We are planning to build more than 2000 F-35s.

will not happen.

I can understand going super expensive and super capable and doing fewer copies, even though that is an iffy proposition knowing that your enemy will come at you with pretty good jets and at numbers many times what we have, but it is pretty scary that our government admits that one the enemy can get close the f-35 is finished because it can not evade. They are asking us to take the at their word that when the Chinese/Russians come at us with a 10-1 advantage in numbers with their damn good planes that our forces are going to survive. I doubt it.

The F-35 is likely to be much like out aircraft carriers, gone in the first days of the war, a big fat juicy target once the enemy gets close enough, and they always will eventually.

Another thing....even by military standards the F-35 helmet with a cost of $600,000 EACH that pilots so far say they rarely use and which they say makes it impossible to visually connect to the side and back of the aircraft, seems like a hard cost to justify.

Perhaps I should ask oralloy just how many flight hours he has in fighters and how much experience he has in air to air combat. I suspect the answer to both questions is zero.

I frankly haven't followed the controversy surrounding the F-35 very closely. It is an attempt to put everything in one aircraft (carrier suitable stealthy fighter/attack), and that often involves hard tradeoffs. The most famous such effort occurred in the late 1960s whan McNamara and his whiz kids decided to design an aircraft that could do everything. The result was the unlamented F-111. As the then head of Naval Aviation explained to the Senate Armed Services Committee , "Senator there isn't enough thrust in nature to turn that truck into a fighter."

georgeob1 wrote:

Perhaps I should ask oralloy just how many flight hours he has in fighters and how much experience he has in air to air combat. I suspect the answer to both questions is zero.

Of course it's zero. I refuse to even board a passenger jet.

But what does that have to do with any of my points?

The point here is there is a lot more to the problem and the tradeoffs involved than can be seen by one with zero real experience.

The issue is do you know the meaning and importance of the words that appear to flow so smoothly from you.

Your gushing comments about canards betrayed a lack of real knowledge of the several technologies behind maneuverability in modern aircraft and a certain fixation on superficial features instead.

Even the issue of maneuverability can be misleading. None of the fighters we deployed throughout all of WWII in the Pacific could equal the Japanese Zero in maneuverability, and initially it gave them a big advantage. Later as we gained more experience and developed aircraft with different compensating features (higher rate of climb/faster acceleration in a dive/better ability to absorb damage, we quickly achieved a very favorable kill ratio in engagements with them and it widened rapidly as our tactics & pilot skills improved and as experienced Japanese pilots were killed * we recycled our combat experienced pilots back to trasining new ones, betting on a long war, while the Japanese kept theirs in the battle, counting on a short one.

The F-4 Phantom wasn't nearly as maneuverable as a MIG 21, but it could out climb and out last one in a vertical scissors. If the MIG tried to match it the F-4 would be on his tail as soon as his nose dropped. Proper tactics can exploit your advantages and defeat those of your opponent, but they are often learned at great cost. In WWII our F6Fs could out accelerate a Zero in a dive so they made single slashing attacks, avoided turning with the Zero,; diving away to climb back and attack again.

Did you see the worry that the plan is to get rid of awacs, to make these guys do that job too? Not cool if it happens, and I'll bet that is the plan.