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Inside the Joint Strike Fighter Competition
jonerik writes "The June issue of the Atlantic Monthly has this account of the history of the Joint Strike Fighter competition between Boeing and Lockheed Martin (which the latter company ended up winning this past fall, with Boeing now touting its expanding line of unmanned aircraft as the true future of tactical aviation). The article does a fine job of showing how the competitors dealt with the challenge of producing an aircraft (now dubbed the F-35) that the Air Force, Navy, Marines, RAF, and Royal Navy could all live with. Funniest part: Boeing's X-32 entry, with its enormous pelican-like jet intake, had some questioning whether the plane's bizarre appearance didn't hurt its chances more than its performance. 'Helpful as my contacts at Boeing were, no one was eager to claim credit for the design of the plane,' says the article's writer James Fallows." Fascinating article.
The direction of these technologies has never been to _replace_ manned platforms, but to supplement the manned fighter and bomber force, particularly in the context of dangerous missions.
Gmanske.
Gmanske.
Fast Company also had an article on this recently.
The F-22A is a replacement for the high hour F-15 A/B and C/D models of single seat interceptor and the two seat trainer versions of those aircraft which are in service with the United States Air Force, Air National Guard, Air Force Reserver, Israeli Defence Forces, Saudi Arabian Air Force.
The F-35 is a replacement for the F-16, Sea Harrier, Harrier GR, Harrier II, F-104, FA-18 A/B and other older single-seat fighters in service with the United States Air Force, United States Navy, United States Marine Corps, Royal Navy, Royal Air Force, Dutch, Belgan, Israeli militaries and possibly the Turkish and Italian, as well as others.
The F-35 is a single seat, single engined aircraft with a top speed of about Mach 1.3. The F-22 is a single seat, twin engined aircraft that can go Mach 1.4 without turning on it's afterburners and has a higher celling than the 35.
In short, there are 2 new fighter planes coming out because there are different roles that need filling.
I thought that the Boeing plane should have won the competition, mostly because it fulfilled the specification better; while being smaller, lighter, and immeasurably simpler. The Boeing plane didn't take off vertically, it's true, but that is also not in the specification -- it's not what was asked for. Similarly, there was no line-item for aesthetics. The Boeing direct-lift concept is the same that powers the Harrier, and is the only demonstrated successful direct lift formula. The clutch-driven lift fan is an Osprey-scale debacle waiting to happen -- mechanically clutching in 40,000 HP in a few seconds with an extremely lightweight gearbox is, I believe, untenable. They finally got it to work for a few tests, but there were a number of fairly spectacular failures along the way. The Boeing design lets the pilot shift from forward to vertical thrust and back again in a few seconds, at will, and they did it more than 100 times during the flight test program -- the Lockheed one was only clutched a handful of times.
The very wide-chord wing of the Boeing design is good for a number of structural, aerodynamic, and stealth reasons. Unfortunately, Boeing elected to change the design for the actual plane to a separate tail, rather than the delta wing -- Lockheed partisans claimed (rightly, IMHO) that this meant that the demonstrator that Boeing flew wasn't really representative of the final plane.
The one terrific thing that the Lockheed design has, the one true aerodynamic innovation, is the bump intake. There's a big bump right in front of the intakes on the Lockheed plane; it performs all of the functions of the typical intake splitter plate, purging the boundary layer, with a far more elegant, lighter, simpler, stealthier, easier-to-maintain design. Hats off to the engineers that came up with that.
I think that the Boeing design is prettier, too, but that's just me -- I'm a low-aspect ratio kind of guy.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Noam Chomsky was a great linguist. Politically, unfortunately, he has moved from pacifist to kook. He has become an idealogue with only one idea: that at the source of all problems is US misbehavior. His logic has become tortured and his rhetoric vague and overblown.
His "explanations" of how the US is responsible for everything from Pol Pot's purges to rain-forest deforestation have become comical; his books have begun to remind me of the old "Connections" show on PBS. In that context, the chains of implausible causality were an excuse to explore interesting bits of history. (No one really thought that yearly floods on the Nile were ultimately responsible for the invention of the electric toothbrush, even if you could create a series of links that connected them.) Unfortunately, Dr. Chomsky seems to take his Theory of Everything very seriously. If something bad has happened in the world, you can be sure that is it "connected" to some US involvement.
The F-111 was in service into the 90s. I believe the EF-111 jamming plane is still in service. In fact, the F-111 proved itself a pretty good plane in Desert Storm.
From http://www.au.af.mil/au/database/projects/ay1996/a csc/96-004/hardware/docs/gau8.htm:
The Avenger is an awesome weapon mounted only on the venerable A/OA-10 attack jet. The GAU-8 is a 30mm, 7 barrel gattling gun used primarily in the air to ground role as a soft target killer and tank buster. The Avenger is the only fighter gattling gun that retains its brass for recycle after the slugs are fired. The gun fires 3,900 rounds per minute, with a mix of both armored piercing incendiary (API) and high explosive incendiary (HEI). The entire front one- third of the A-10 consists of the gun. Many joke about the GAU-8 being designed first, with the airplane built around the gun after.
Aside from the jokes, the gun is also very effective in aerial combat against helicopters or fast moving fighter jets getting too close and slow. The gun is deadly accurate and feared by enemy tank commanders worldwide. The gun's performance was demonstrated thoroughly during Desert Storm at the able hands of Hog pilots. The highly maneuverable and agile A-10, combined with the GAU-8, is a force to be both feared and reckoned with on the battlefield.
The avenger could probbably put a few holes in the hull of a carrier, but it has no chance of sinking it, and no chance AT ALL of getting close enough to hit it. All US Navy ships have at least one of these bad boys (from Raytheon's website):
The Phalanx Close-In Weapon System is a rapid-fire, computer-controlled, radar-guided gun system designed to defeat anti-ship missiles and other close-in air and surface threats. The system employs a pneumatically driven 20 mm Gatling gun with a fire rate of 4500 rounds per minute, and closed-loop-spotting radar technology to engage threats. A self-contained package, Phalanx automatically carries out functions usually performed by multiple systems -- including search, detection, threat evaluation, tracking, engagement, and kill assessment.
Smoking is an expensive, slow, and unreliable method of suicide.
The RAF recently did a visibility survey to decide what colour to paint their training aircraft to avoid 'near misses'.
They found that an all-black aircraft was more easily seen than any other colour.
"Information wants to be paid"