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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.
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?
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
This damned plane has been a big scam from the beginning.
It was going to be all things to all people, but in reality it was a way to get other countries to pay for the R&D of a huge wishlist of things which was never going to come true.
As someone who lives in one of the countries who got suckered into the F-35, this program has been nothing but lies and bullshit since it was announced.
This was the military listing a huge wishlist of things, including a pony, they were going to do.
Instead, it's underperforming, not up to the claims, over budget, years behind schedule, and still a crappy replacement for the things it was supposed to be doing.
Everything about the F-35 has been a pile of lies of bullshit since it was announced. And it seems like everybody (except the people selling it and the people who got conned into signing up for it) has know this for that entire time.
I hope everybody says "piss off" and walks away from the contract.
This plane is proving what people have been saying for the last decade -- that it was never going to live up to the promises made.
As a supposed air-superiority platform, this is an utter failure. I bet they don't even have the VTOL version working yet.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Well, the reality is, like shock and awe, you can't just pretend you don't have to cover certain parts of warfare.
So, bombing the shit out of stuff and thinking people will become demoralized and welcome you with open arms ... utterly useless if you can't put boots on the ground. For the same reason that bombing ISIS only goes so far.
And, likewise, if you can't maintain air superiority in an up close and personal manner, you can't do the roles like close air ground support. So if you do have boots on the ground, you can't keep them safe if you get your ass kicked.
People can pretend this will never be needed again. That doesn't mean if you ever found yourself in an actual war you wouldn't.
So, if the people you're up against have things which can beat you down in a dogfight, you could quickly find yourself realizing you're ill equipped for a given situation.
Somewhere along the line they decided to make the Swiss-Army knife of aircraft, which it turns out is terribly suited to most of its applications.
Which is moot, because the plane is so late and over budget it should never go into production .. in which case it's years of wasted money and effort to come up with a solution which doesn't work.
Which, sadly, was what people said from the beginning.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
And the US spends $1000 Billion+ on a plane, designed to kill. Imagine, if you can, a world without war, it's easy if you try.
The big red flag that nobody caught (since nobody actually reads the articles) is that the story is completely unsourced. Where did the author of this blog get his hands on this information? Why can't we see it? What's the name of it? When was it declassified? A quick google search finds the same story being echoed verbatim by the likes of the Daily Mail and others; all of which simply link back to this blog as the source. Until we see an actual source, it's bullshit - how are we supposed to know they didn't just make this up?
/. readerbase was supposed to be smart?
The article summary said "can't turn or climb fast enough" but the article itself showcases the pilot complaining about nose-rate only - i.e. turn rate. As anyone who knows anything about Air Combat Maneuvering can tell you, turn rate is the LEAST important aspect of maneuverability. Roll rate is far, far more important, as every aerodynamic maneuver aside from a loop begins with a roll. Aircraft with superior roll rate can shake better-turning fighters through maneuvers like the rolling scissors. Unsurprisingly, its through tactics like these that the F4F Wildcat held its own against the Japanese Zero, and when the Wildcat was up-engined to become the F6F Hellcat it dominated the Zero flat-out. The US Navy would later adopt the F4F Phantom, a fighter that eschewed turn-rate entirely in favor of absolutely insane thrust (the jet set several world speed records.) They were told this plane could not dogfight - and then pilots like Duke Cunningham defeated nimble little MiG-17s in close combat.
Once upon a time a group of industry experts who thought the Japanese had it right formed a clique named the "Lightweight Fighter Mafia," and their efforts eventually produced the F-16. Pleased with their accomplishment, they spent their time since then spewing BS about every single aircraft to come after it, including the F-18. To this day you hear people claiming the F-18 is a "turkey" and "can't dogfight" and that the navalized F-16 was passed over by the Navy due to sheer inter-service rivalry and pigheadedness. That this bullshit flies in the face of actual pilot accounts doesn't seem to slow them down a whit. The F-22 had its turn on the bullseye, and now it's the F-35s turn.
In light of the decades-old pattern of "sneer at the new expensive jet" popular amongst industry professionals and armchair warriors alike, a complete failure of the article to quote any opinion on the F-35s vertical maneuvering ability (the go-to counter to turnfighter tactics) and the simple fact that the source is completely undisclosed, I'm calling bullshit on this one - and on everyone who decided to sling out a pithy comment without doing a five-second bullshit check. I thought