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.

Comments

Re:F-22 vs. F-35

[Wyatt Earp]

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.

my pros and cons on the two planes

[Thagg]

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