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The WWII-Era Inspired Plane Giving the F-35 a Run For Its Money
schwit1 writes: The US military almost adopted the A-29 Super Tucano, a $4 million turboprop airplane reminiscent of WWII-era designs that troops wanted, commanders said was "urgently needed," but Congress refused to buy. "It's a great plane," says recently retired Air Force Lt. Col. Shamsher Mann, an F-16 pilot who has flown A-29s. "Pilots love it. It handles beautifully, sips gas, and can go anywhere. If you want to get into the fight and mix it up with the guys on the ground, the Super T is a great platform." The Super Tucano provided the "low-end" air-to-ground attack capability the United States simply never had in Afghanistan-a capability the Pentagon's F-35 could never hope to replicate.
If we could only double the price of the F-35 I'm sure it would be..... better.
Can we PLEASE cancel the F-35 and develop airplanes we can actually use? The F-35 reminds me of a sci-fi book where alien horde A has primitive ships, but a lot of them. They also are not too bright and throw more ships at every battle. Their enemies, alien horde B, keep coming up with new inventions and more amazing ships. Their ships get so expensive even losing a few bankrupts them and they surrender.
It's not a "WWII-era" plane just because it has a propeller. Is the Humvee WWII-era because it has wheels??
Lockheed Martin and Boeing don't want low cost weapons programs that utilize off the shelf components. The markup is too low.
The problem with that analogy is that, in the case of the F-35; the military does, in fact, want to go off-roading on that steep, rugged, slippery trail in the middle of nowhere. But they think that they can take the Corvette, raise its suspension a bit and give it off-road tires, and it'll be better than the Jeep.
Imagine all the people...
Because the Air Force brass hates the Close Air Support (CAS) mission. It's partly a cultural thing - they want to fight wars where airpower is preeminent, where they take the starring role. They don't want to spend their time playing support to the Army/etc (despite the fact that it's been proven, time and again, that this is largely how you win wars - hitting infrastructure etc helps, but does not by itself win the war). They've been trying to kill off the A-10 for years, too, and only failing because the Army loves it, though they've managed to push it off to the Air National Guard.
It probably also helps to understand that, even beyond this air warfare centric mentality, the Air Force is largely dominated at the senior levels by fighter pilots now. Ever since SAC's role and prominence was reduced following the end of the Cold War, fighter pilots have been preeminent, with strategic bombing coming in second, and close air support all but nonexistent. After all, look at the aircraft they're pushing - expensive hi-tech single-seater air combat platforms. They see something like the A-10, or the A-29 Super Tucano, as threats that take away money and resources that could be better used for more F-35s, despite the fact that it's overpriced and underperforming, and that you could probably get 10 A-29s or equivalent for 1 F-35, or better.
The really sad thing about the F-111 was that it actually could have been a good plane, if they'd bothered to make different versions tailored to the different needs of each of the services, rather than trying to force a "one size fits all" mentality. The Navy, incidentally, went back to the drawing board after they backed out of supporting the F-111, and came up with the F-14 Tomcat. There's no way they'd be capable of doing that in today's environment, sadly.
The F-35 might have been at least halfway decent if we didn't have to design the whole plane around the Marines' VSTOL requirement, which is really the primary thing that kills it (aside from the ridiculous attempt to assign the CAS role to it).
Seriously ... WTF!?!
An A-10 has a hourly maintenance costs of roughly $12,000 per hour flown. The F-35 is already sitting at a guess-ta-ment of $32,000 per hour flown.
Chart
To quote.
the A-10 Thunderbolt II is the cheapest aircraft to operate in terms of both flight hours and individual procurement costs. The A-10's low costs are due to the plane's rugged but functional structural designs.
Lets not talk about the $148 million a piece price tag for the base F-35 model. A-10's start at around $30 million each. You let me know when one F-35 can out compete four A-10's for air to ground combat.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.