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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.
"Batteries not included."
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
From a Canadian perspective the big advantages of going with the Super Hornet is backwards compatibility (even more-so than the lower price).
- The Super Hornet is compatible with the current RCAF in-air refuelling technology
- The Super Hornet technology is an upgrade to what we already have - our techs are compatible / familiar with it
- The Super Hornet does not require longer runways for landing - our remote arctic runways are compatible
- The Super Hornet has landing gear better suited for icy runways - our weather is compatible
It's not as stealthy but we are a defensive military.
- The Super Hornet is also half the price.
The Harper Government has a hard-on for the F35 and the Canadian public really has no idea WHY.
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
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.
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
The F-35 outperforms the superhornet even if the SH is slicked off, lubed up, and going down-hill with another SH pushing it
Not if it doesn't fly...
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
From the inception, the F-35 seemed to me like it was doomed to failure.
It was a massive development project which was set up in such a way as to try to convince allies to buy this plane before any existed and have them fund the development. It was supposed to have several different variants including a VTOL one.
It's been plagued with cost overruns, delays, and almost everything else. It's always struck me as an obscenely expensive plane with a lot of risks, and as countries are starting to ask "do we really want this", it could leave those still in the program with mounting costs since it's no longer being paid for by as many governments.
From the start, this was a program designed to get everybody to help pay for a pie-in-the-sky plane which was completely unproven. This is just a program to line the contractor's pockets, and for the US to try to get someone else to help pay for it.
Unfortunately, a lot of people warned about how this would happen, but they got ignored. If anybody thinks this it's a surprise that F-35 program has been ridiculously expensive with very little results, they haven't been paying attention. 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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Not to bitch at you personally, but it's a pet hate of mine seeing the tired old "These things are useless nowadays" arguments.
People were saying the same thing years ago about the Sea Harrier here in the UK, then the Falklands happened.
The point is, just because we're fighting low tech opponents hiding in mountains right now, doesn't mean we wont be fighting a completely different type of war tomorrow.
These sorts of military purposes are made not because of what's going on right at the time of development, but as a piece in the larger military puzzle that'll be expected to have a life of 20 - 30 years. A lot can happen in that time - in the last 30 years cold war style dog fighting was still a very real prospect, and manned jets were essential to missions in The Falklands, Yugoslavia, and Iraq.
Whilst we're at a point where drones could replace some functionality, the Slashdot mindset that drones can replace every manned air function is false. This wont always be the case, but right now maintaining a manned air to air presence is smart unless you want to risk being caught with your pants down.
Put simply, it doesn't really matter what type of wars we're in right now or have been for the last 10 years, the question is, can we absolutely guarantee that there will be no use for manned aircraft in the next 30 years? Is it 100% guaranteed that there wont be say, a small skirmish over disputed islands between China and it's neighbours? Can we absolutely guarantee that Russia wont attack an Eastern European state that is more strategic to the West than Georgia was requiring some intervention? The answer is no, absolutely not, we most certainly cannot guarantee these things, and whilst that remains true, these new planes serve a purpose - getting rid of them, even if they only act as a deterrent and they never actually have to be used, would only make such scenarios more likely.
The likes of Chinese pilots in their new stealth aircraft would love nothing more than a turkey shoot of pathetic drones with their lack of situational intelligence and awareness, their high latency and so forth in a combat situation in 20 years time.
Regarding your question about avoiding missiles, shoulder launched SAMs tend to have pretty limited altitude, and even more expensive systems don't necessarily seem particularly effective. Remember that Israel flew some older F15s/F16s right through some brand spanking new Russian bought Syrian SAM batteries to blow up their nuclear program and out again without incident.
It's about insuring against the unknowns over the next decades until drone technology is genuinely mature enough to completely and utterly replace it. That's what it's about.
since when is the government concerned with the price of anything?
We have a Conservative government, they need to spend money, put us back in debt (we had a balanced budget for 8 years until the right wingers got into power with their cut taxes and increase spending policy) so they can cut the things they don't like such as science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The F-18 was a complete boondoggle. I'm going from memory, but IIRC it was born out of a competition for a single aircraft to serve both Air Force and Navy (sound familiar so far?). The design that would become the F-16 won, but the Navy wanted a second engine so we ended up building TWO fighters. F-16 development went fairly well, but the F-18 proved to cost far more than initially thought as the specs changed underneath of it. A major design iteration (redesign?) resulted in the Super Hornet, and both configurations currently fly. But the path was not smooth or cheap.
If anything, the F/A-18 program shows how iterative design is generally smoother and more cost effective than a clean sheet design. Other examples include the gradual changes that keep the 747 and 727 viable, versus the 787 or A-380 programs.
Not that a clean sheet design is doomed - you have programs like the 777, which went pretty well. And sometimes the technology changes significantly enough that iterative design will no longer result in acceptable performance. I'm not sure what it would have cost to modify the F/A-18 to include stealth and internal weapons, but I'm betting it wouldn't have been cheap. And it almost certainly would not have produced a VTOL version.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
I have often have doubts whether these fighter planes really have any use nowadays. Especially dogfighting seems to be a bit outdated in times of cheap shoulder launched surface to air missiles.
Dog fighting outdated? Not so fast!
Those who don't know history, are bound to repeat it.
The art of the dog fight has been dismissed as unnecessary before. Military planners who thought they knew, dismissed the need for dog fighting by saying "Hey, we have missiles and radar, nobody is going to dog fight anymore!" Poof! We got the F4 Phantom, which was a great interceptor with a really powerful radar, but a less than ideal platform for dog fighting. You could quickly get your opponent in range, but you had better kill him with the first missile shot because if you got into a turning fight with most of the opposition, you where going to loose in the bulky F4. We adjusted tactics and used the F4 high speed to swoop in, shoot a missile and bug out at Mac 2 before getting shot at. Didn't always work that well, but it helped keep the kill ratio up. We struggled with that oversight for decades until the F-16 came along and fixed the problem and allowed us to dog fight again.
History teaches that Air superiority requires both advanced missile technology AND superior dog fighting capacity. Stealth is a great feature, but it is only going to really help if you can shoot the opponent before he can see you. Once you are in visual range, you had better have the best sustained turn rate and a gun or you will loose (which is where the F4 failed).
You may not need flocks of F-35s, but having some is a good idea. Having flocks of F-18's is not a bad idea, as it's a fine dog fighter too. I vote we buy a mix of about 1 F35 to 4-5 F18's myself. But don't.. Please don't dismiss the importance of dog fighting to air power.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The MQ-9's a pretty awesome piece of hardware for what it does, but it's no replacement for an F-16 in contested airspace.
... and an F-16 is no replacement for a reaper when it comes to long duration reconnaissance, or operating in areas were the loss or capture of a pilot is politically unacceptable. They are different planes for different missions.
What would be cool is to see what we could do if we set out to build a real air superiority fighter drone. We could have each defense contractor build a squadron, and send them out over the desert on a real shoot out with live ordnance. The winner gets the contract. The contest could be filmed and made into a reality TV show to mitigate the procurement cost.
Can someone explain to me why we have 50 million hungry in America, including 17 million children
I can try, but you might not understand.
The number you are citing most likely comes from the USDA ERS report about food security. It does not represent people who ARE hungry, it includes people who had to buy less desirable food at some time during the year, but they still got enough to eat.
The number of those who are actually hungry, who ate less because they didn't have enough money, is much lower. Among those are people who don't know how to manage a budget and ran out of money just before a new paycheck came. The number of people who are actually starving is very low. We have government programs to deal with these problems already.
Now, I think we should reduce our spending on warfare, but you at least should understand the numbers you're throwing around.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Isn't 24/7 for three days more like 24/3?
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.
That's because the F-35 employs the latest in multi-congressional district job program management. It is also far superior to the older F/A-18 E/F because the latter lacks the F-35's advanced lobby-based cash vectoring nozzles.
So, um, why don't fighters have rear guns?
even something automatic like a small version of the ship missile defense systems? instead of using flares/chaff/jamming to distract a missle, just shoot it directly.
(maybe they do, but it's super-secret?)
This is true, on paper.
Every engine has a crack tolerance on the turbine fan blades (and they all develop cracks), the tolerances allowed greatly differ between single and twin engine jets. Remember, when you lose your single engine, you don't just lose thrust, you lose all power as well, so while they have a backup, it typically only lasts about 10 minutes. They don't take chances. Because of this, F16's made in the 80's and 90's actually need engines replaced FAR more often than the older twin engine aircraft made in the 60's by a significant amount.
I worked on these aircraft, for every engine I changed on a twin, I did at least 20 on singles, and no, that isn't an exaggeration. Send them to the desert and things only got worse.