Test Pilot: the F-35 Can't Dogfight

schwit1 sends this report from the War Is Boring column: A test pilot has some very, very bad news about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The pricey new stealth jet can't turn or climb fast enough to hit an enemy plane during a dogfight or to dodge the enemy's own gunfire, the pilot reported following a day of mock air battles back in January. And to add insult to injury, the JSF flier discovered he couldn't even comfortably move his head inside the radar-evading jet's cramped cockpit. "The helmet was too large for the space inside the canopy to adequately see behind the aircraft." That allowed the F-16 to sneak up on him. The test pilot's report is the latest evidence of fundamental problems with the design of the F-35 — which, at a total program cost of more than a trillion dollars, is history's most expensive weapon. Your tax dollars at work.

Comments

Drone It

[thedonger]

How much extra to make a drone version with 360 degree cameras? Fuck it. We're at $1 trillion. What's a few hundred billion more?

Re:Drone It

[Penguinisto]

Perhaps, though to be fair, much of this can be worked around (for how much? Tons o cash, eh?)

It's fairly standard that smaller/slower aircraft are very often more agile than the bigger boys - you just have to find the aircraft's strengths and play to those. For instance, the tiny T-35/F5 can commonly out-maneuver an F-15... at lower altitudes. At higher altitudes, the F-15 handles itself better in the thinner air of the upper stratosphere.

The F-16 is more than agile in lower altitudes, because it was built to be a combination air/air air/ground fighter, which leads me to believe that maybe these dogfights were conducted at lower altitudes... I am also curious (haven't looked) as to what the flight/fight profile of the F-35 is in the first place. if it's Air Superiority, then that usually means higher altitudes where there may be a better advantage. Anything else appears to be a whole lot of incompetence in design.

All that said, they had to know there were going to be compromises when doing the whole stealth (maneuverability) and STOL/VTOL (engine power) thing.

Or, best bet may be to scrap the damn thing and hold a competition for an aircraft that's worth a damn, and this time make the entrants build a working prototype *first*, without any governmental money up front... like they did in the old days.

Re:Drone It

[bluefoxlucid]

It sounds to me like our current crop of F16 fighters are superior. Why do we have a $1 trillion plane? I'm not saying it's a lot of money--it's only about $100bn every year, maybe less, for 10 years of development; and even $1 trillion right now one time wouldn't be a world-changing amount of money--but this is a lot of waste that could have gone elsewhere, for no obvious purpose. Somebody said, "We need better planes!", and I question why, when we have such fantastic planes, and when historical wars included clearly-inferior planes like MIG fighters wiping the floor with models three decades more up-to-date.

Re:Drone It

[Anonymous Coward]

We're not "at $1 trillion." The $1 trillion figure is the total program cost, through 2038, including all development, procurement, training, operations, upgrades and repairs. Between now and 2038, by simply extrapolating 2015 figures, (which is a conservative approach) the US will create about $385 trillion of wealth and the Federal government will collect $71 trillion in tax revenue. Spending 0.2% of that product on a powerful weapon is entirely reasonable.

As for the F-35; it's a stealth multirole fighter with VTOL. Dog fighting was never the top priority. Using the F-16 to disparage new designs, as was done with the Eurofighter and the F-22, is now a traditional tactic of pentagon critics and should be dismissed as the bullshit that it is.

The story is a hit piece from an anonymous source written by a peacenik named David Axe that advocates, among other stupid things, abolishing the US Air Force.

Re:Drone It

[ihtoit]

that's the GDP of Australia you're talking about, I think it's a bit of a world changer for about twenty three million 'Roos.

Re: Drone It

[Chris Mattern]

You mean "Oft times better than a master of one"?

Re:Drone It

[NicBenjamin]

Current planes are much superior at fighting World War 2, where dogfighting at speed was the norm.

For future wars it's not quite so clear. The last time we engaged in any real dogfights was Vietnam. The Iraqis, who had the planes to dogfight us in the first war, fled to Iran because they figured they'd die of massed missile fire before they got into cannon range.

The theory behind F-35 is that it's virtually impossible to detect, and we have the electronic warfare capabilities to detect anything anyone else actually has. That means that F-35 should be able to fly around at Mach 1.6 with being targeted by the enemy (who don't even know where it is), while firing off it's missiles whenever an enemy aircraft gets into range. It's more a submarine or cloaked starship then a fighter craft. If it works it'll revolutionize aerial warfare and instantly make every Air Force in the world obsolete. Especially the one belonging to Vladimir Putin.

Re:Drone It

[Gryle]

Getting on to most military bases in the US is fairly easy. Getting into the secured buildings where the interesting stuff goes on is much much harder.

Re:Drone It

[aix tom]

Especially the one belonging to Vladimir Putin.

I wonder how the same dogfight test would play out against the Sukhoi PAK FA, the somewhat comparable new Russian stealth fighter. The F-35 seems to have a maximum g-load of 9g, while the PAK-FA has one of over 9g. The thrust/weight ratio of the PAK FA also is higher, at 1.02 to 1.36 depending on configuration and fuel load, compared to the F-35s of 0.87 to 1.07. (At least as far as the "official/unclassified" specifications seem to go)

Re:Drone It

[Martin Blank]

The main problem is the Marines wanting a replacement for the Harrier, something that can do STOL/STOVL operations, and that is completely under their control. The JSF was already under development, and the contractors said they could figure out how to make it fit the Marine requirements. What we got was a fighter that can't dogfight, a strike aircraft with a pitifully small payload, and the political impossibility of starting over from scratch.

One of the lessons that came out of this and the Zumwalt-class destroyer programs is that the military should stop trying to cram every feature into a program. While the proliferation of designs led to unwieldy logistics in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the attempts to simplify everything have resulted in a reduced overall capability and the need to extend the lifetimes of planes the new projects were meant to replace. The F-15 and F-16 will still be around for decades, and may form a larger part of the tactical strike platforms than the USAF would like to admit. The same will probably be the case with the F/A-18E against the Navy's F-35C.

Dedicated designs are the most efficient. Some of them turn out to be spectacular at other jobs. The F-15 was designed with the adage "not a pound for air-to-ground" and yet from it was developed the F-15E Strike Eagle, an extremely effective air-to-ground platform. Hopefully the military is listening when it goes trying to build its next platform, a replacement for the B-1, B-2, and B-52 expected to come online between 2035 and 2045.

Re:Drone It

[amorsen]

Drone pilots don't seem to have much of a conscience either. They are far removed from the action, the consequences, less involved.

Drone pilots suffer at least as much from PTSD as regular pilots. However, their work environment is tailored to ensure that their kill performance is excellent. If a pilot who is in a plane does not take a shot, it seems to be considered more of a judgement call based on what they saw, whereas if a drone pilot fails to take a shot, all the video evidence is there to go through in the debriefing. Those who fail to perform or who want to leave the assignment are threatened with dishonourable discharge.

Do not judge them as people without conscience. They are victims too.

Re:Drone It

[subreality]

The idea was better stuff, quicker and cheaper. It turned out - like some of the lessons Boeing learned with the 787 - that agile development may work great at Facebook but it's a train wreck when applied to aerospace, military systems and gigantic procurements. Oops.

One of the basic ideas of agile dev is to get a partially-working system in the field ASAP. Doing so lets you figure out much sooner (10% into a project) that the design requirements are wrong, and that you need to rethink what you're doing. In this case, the loop wasn't closed - there were plenty of early signs that it was going wrong, but the project just kept going forward without reevaluating the basic requirements (VTOL being the most obvious case).

I don't think that means agile dev won't work for aerospace generally. It's more an indication that the organizations involved (governments and military contractors) are too heavy to handle an agile process: imagine trying to go back to congress once a month to get the requirements updated based on dev feedback. Smaller, independent companies like SpaceX can manage a much faster, cheaper cycle on the space side, and I think it's possible for a new military aero supplier to do the same.

There were also plenty of f***ups in assumptions the program made that were only really recognizable in hindsight, like the fact that trying to mesh the Marines' requirement for a V/STOL aircraft with the traditional designs for the Air Force and Navy hobbled the plane's performance for all three constituencies.

That wasn't only seen in hindsight. It's obvious that adding complicated, heavy components to something that's supposed to be fast and reliable is going to create problems. It was more of a "let's see how well we can apply modern materials and design to make this work" kind of thing... Initial tests showed it was possible, but a bit further into the program it was clear that it was still too much of a tradeoff to be worthwhile.

Re:just let it go

[Penguinisto]

Welcome to Sunk Cost.

Sucks, but breaking that addiction is incredibly hard... doubly so when egos are just as much on the line as money.

Re:Dogfights?! What year is it?!

[pesho]

When was the last time you've ever heard of a dogfight?

In pretty much every war every war where both opponents had air capability, including the first Gulf war and the Balkan war. In the first Gulf war air-to-air combat usually happened after the pilots could get visual confirmation that the target is not a friendly. If you are in visual range you are pretty much in a dog fight. Pierre Sprey, the man who brought us the F16 and the A10, has the best description of the F-35:

"A turkey. Cannot run, cannot hide and cannot fight"

If you read the article, you will notice that the F-35 failed a test that was stacked in its favor - The F-35 did not carry any load, while the F16 was saddled with two external tanks.

Re:No Source, No Story - complete bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting AC to not undo mods: I can't speak to the all of what you're speaking. But the F6F Hellcat is not simply an "Upengined F4F." It was a completely new design, and designed specifically to counter the Zero. And even it couldn't (or wasn't supposed to) dogfight with a Zero, because the Zero was more maneuverable. Instead it was meant to use 'boom and zoom' tactics to put the fight on more favorable terms where it had the advantage, such as in speed. The F-35 doesn't appear to have any of the advantages. It's slower, and is (arguably, perhaps) less maneuverable. Maybe it won't be as bad as people say, but there's also the fact that a great pilot can win with fewer advantages by playing to his/her strengths, but an average one has a harder time doing so. The plane DOES matter. Chuck Yeager shot down jets in his P-51, does that we should still be using propeller driven fighters? For this kind of price tag, I'd want a plane that can not only do VSTOL, but can do Gerwalk mode at a minimum, if not full Battroid.

War is Boring is shit

[inhuman_4]

Oh look, another F-35 hack job by David Axe from War is Boring. Maybe if he wasn't so consistently full of shit, or actually had a source to quote I'd bother to read his blog.

First, it's a strike fighter, why the fuck are people getting so worked up about dog-fighting? You know that these planes are not yet rated for their full flight envelope, or you would if Axe did his job. You would also know that the F-35 has more than twice the range of the F-16. Imagine that, a strike fighter that carrier more weight in fuel than point defence fighter. It's almost like dog-fighting wasn't the primary design goal. You know what else can't dogfight? The A-10 that guys like Axe are always furiously masturbating over.

Second, this isn't the 1970s. Sure dogfights may happen, but a hell of a lot less than BVR attacks and SAMs. And before anyone starts talking about Vietnam, go look at the numbers for that war. The little blurb you got about F-4 Phantom from watching Top Gun is wrong. For every plane lost in a dogfight, two were lost to AA missiles, and five were lost to SAMs, in the fucking 70s. Lord knows the world hasn't had any other conflicts since then from which to draw lessons.

Third, it's the most expensive plane program in history at $1T? No shit, the program is to build and maintain almost 3,000 fighters over 50 years. In fact is "almost" as expensive as the $3T to keep doing what we are doing: pumping out a half dozen different air frames with no common supply chain so that each one can be good at exactly one mission. But if you still think it is too expensive, I have to ask, compared to what? The F-22? Not even close. The Eurofighter? Lol. Russia's latest vaporware? Sure if they ever build more than some prototypes. Some last generation platform with no stealth? Sure that will make a great strike platform against an air defence system in contested air space. The money you save on a "cheap" F-16 Block 60s at $70 million vs an F-35A at ~$85-90 million, won't even cover the cost of all the extra shit you have to attach to it to F-16 to get the same performance.

These endless hack jobs on the F-35 project need to stop. This isn't 2008, we have over 100 of these things flying already. They are a mostly known quantity, and they greatly out perform the systems they are going to replace.