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Boeing Touts Fighter Jet To Rival F-35 — At Half the Price
An anonymous reader sends this news from the CBC:
"In a dogfight of defense contractors, the hunter can quickly become the hunted. It's happening now to the F-35. The world's largest defense contractor, Lockheed Martin, is trying to convince wavering U.S. allies — including Canada — to stick with its high-tech, high-priced and unproven F-35 stealth fighter. But the F-35 is way behind schedule, way over budget and, now, it's grounded by a mysterious crack in a turbine fan. After years of technical problems, it's a tempting target for Lockheed Martin's rivals. It's no surprise, then, that the No. 2 defense contractor, Boeing, smells blood... The Super Hornet, it says, is a proven fighter while the F-35 is just a concept — and an expensive one at that. ... The Super Hornet currently sells for about $55 million U.S. apiece; the Pentagon expects the F-35 to cost twice as much — about $110 million."
If you bothered to RTFA, you'd see that 500 superhornets are in active service right now. The "Superhornet" isn't really that new and it has issues such as it is still too-short ranged although an improvement over the original F-18, and it suffers from the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none capability profile. However, it is real, it is proven, and it can likely receive some halfway decent upgrades without costing anywhere near as much as the F-35.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Boeing has also been pushing the Silent Eagle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_F-15SE_Silent_Eagle Which might be an even better choice for Canada. The thing is that Defending Canada is not that high of a priority of the Canadian military. It is working as part of NATO and for that the F-35 will be better. BTW this history of problems and doubt about aircraft is not new. Happened with the F-14, F-15, F-18, B-1, C-5, C-17, Apache, and so on. New airplanes have more problems than older aircraft.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I wasn't sure about that figure, so I went to look on the Reaper's fact sheet.
They're actually $53 million apiece. You could buy four F-16s with that.
I'm going to go cry in a corner now.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Half the price for the piece of paper with the specs on it. But like the dreamliner, Boeing will deliver late, overbudget, and with serious issues forcing it to be grounded. Cos that's how it works. The more you pay, the less you get.
Really? The F/A-18 E/F acquisition program was an unparalleled success. The aircraft emerged from Engineering and Manufacturing Development meeting all of its performance requirements on cost, on schedule and 400 pounds under weight. All of this was verified in Operational Verification testing, the final exam, passing with flying colors receiving the highest possible endorsement.
Ezekiel 23:20
The F-18 has no vertical takeoff capability.
Neither does the F-35. Only the F-35B is short-takeoff-vertical-landing. The A variant takes off and lands normally and that's the one Canada is/was considering.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
The F-18 has no vertical takeoff capability
So what? Neither does F-35.
Ezekiel 23:20
For what it's worth, the Super Hornet shares very little with the original Hornet. It's only called the Super Hornet because it was easier to sell it as an "upgrade" instead of a new aircraft.
I read the internet for the articles.
The big issue is do you want one plane to do the job of three or do you want three planes to do the job of three? The F-35 was designed around the premise that a single airframe could be purposed into multiple roles. Except now the various F-35's have essentially different airframes. Yes, there are some similarities but overall, you aren't saving any money or time and you're losing flexibility - you have a bunch of expensive eggs in a small basket as opposed to a larger number of cheaper aircraft.
The F-35 is designed to fight against other aircraft that haven't been developed. The F-18 / F-16 are still more than equal to other current fighters. In reality, the only enemy we need to be worried about it the Chinese and if we end up in dogfights with them, which philosophy - a few expensive, highly functional planes vs. a whole shitload of narrower role aircraft - do you think they will chose? (Yes, I know, they're copying the F-22 and F-35 but then again, so are the Iranians).
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That 53 million is for FOUR of them,. with ordnance.
Yes, taking out the human saves a lot of money.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
There are multiple roles for small fighter jets:
- Air to Air interceptors. Drones don't go all that fast and as of yet don't have the same sensor processing ability of a human being. You need somebody to scope out the situation and report back. Bonus points for being survivable. You also need somebody to protect the big slow transports.
- Air to Ground. Yes, the drone can drop a hellfire or two. Absolutely worthless compared to an A-10. (Of course, we don't really have anything that is an upgrade to an A-10 but that's another issue). The current crop of drones are capable of blowing up fragile little meat popsicles but not a whole lot beyond.
Yes, eventually we will have mecca wars with no humans involved. But not just yet.
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Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It's already flying.
And unless Boeing already has a plane in the works, I'm not sure I'd believe their claims of being able to do it cheaper any more than Lockheed's.
*sigh* It's in the summary. The Super-hornet is what they are talking about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_F/A-18E/F_Super_Hornet
Do you Gentoo!?
Your history is a bit off (it's more like you are talking about the F-111 fiasco) - the YF-17 lost to the YF-16 in the USAFs lightweight fighter competition. The navy needed a new fighter, and were told to look at the YF-17 as a base, which was developed into the F-18.
The "austere locations" crap that the Marines keep talking about is just that: crap.
What's actually going on is that, in addition to the eleven supercarriers that the U.S. Navy uses, they also have another nine "amphibious assault ships", which would be called a small aircraft carrier if they were in any other navy. (The newest design, the America-class, doesn't even have a well deck for launching boats; it's just a smaller aircraft carrier.) These carriers can't field catapault-launched aircraft like the F/A-18; they're more like the UK's carriers in that they only field helicopters and VTOL aircraft. Right now that means the Harrier, but the Harrier is a clunky old piece of shit and BAE ain't making new ones anymore, so once those wear out it's either F-35 or helicopters only.
Im going to list some of the most successful fighters in US history. We produced thousands, and they in turn downed thousands of North Korean, North Chinese, and North Vietnamese pilots. In addition they carried out thousands of ground attack sorties and dropped thousands of pounds of ordinance.
F-80
F-84
F-86
F-100
F-102
F-104
F-105
F-106
Each of these aircraft has one thing in common: they only have a single engine. And these were the aircraft from the days when turbines were "unreliable" and had incredibly short work cycles (maximum hours flying time) in between total overhauls. In one case, the F-105, the platform was responsible for over 75% of all ordinance dropped in Vietnam; yes, the F-105 dropped more than 3x as many bombs as all other aircraft combined in that war, and that includes the massive B-52 bombing runs.
This single engine lawn dawn thing was a baseless criticism leveled at the F-16 by its competitors, and it stuck. But it was baseless then, and its baseless now.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
There are multiple roles for small fighter jets:
- Air to Ground. Yes, the drone can drop a hellfire or two. Absolutely worthless compared to an A-10. (Of course, we don't really have anything that is an upgrade to an A-10 but that's another issue). The current crop of drones are capable of blowing up fragile little meat popsicles but not a whole lot beyond.
Yes, eventually we will have mecca wars with no humans involved. But not just yet.
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Just to be as accurate as possible.... An A-10 is NOT designed for the fighter role. It is an "attack" role airframe, specifically designed for attacking armored ground targets in this case. It's not that an A-10 cannot be used for ACM, or that the pilots don't train for air-to-air situation, it's just not it's role and wasn't designed for this kind of thing so it pretty much sucks as a fighter.
How can you tell? Well, in the US we use the first letter to designate an aircraft's role. "C" - Cargo (C130, C5 etc), "A" - Ground Attack/Close air support (A10, AV8B, A-4, etc), F - Fighter (Air to Air platform, F-4 F14, F16, F-18 etc), "O" - Observation (OV-10) , T = Trainer, K = Tanker. Some aircraft have two letters. FA-18 means an F-18 outfitted with Ground Attack capacity that can still do Air to Air missions.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101