Forum: F-35 Lightning II

sewerrat wrote:

What is wrong with the F-35 is everything. Its not an air superiority fighter

LOL! It was never meant to be an air superiority fighter!

sewerrat wrote:

With a scant 180 airframes of the -22, and the new gen of Sukhoi rolling out, keeping the geopolitcal situation out of the question, the USAF is in deep crap.

Yeah, USAF is in a deep crap. Why? Becouse they have ~180 Raptors and will have several hundreds F-35's when the first T-50 enters service. How much T-50 are they going to buy? 250? It will be good if they can afford half of that.
Deap crap isn't it? Rolling Eyes

sewerrat wrote:

Its an air superiority fighter and has passive sensors and stealth to be able to pick off our 'stealth' fighters.

I has nothing. No radar yet, no passive sensors, no RHAWS, no engines. Nothing is ready.

sewerrat wrote:

The rest of the world is going for pure fighters, and the US is now for the first time in my life actually ad purposefully fielding garbage.

You're so wrong. F-35 is going to be great strike fighter, much better than the F-16. Better radar, IRIST, DAS, sensor fusion, stealth, greater range... and you claim it's a crap - just becouse it was not designed to be an air superiority fighter. The Cold War is over. Soviet Union is dead. There is no risk of a global conflict(at the moment). There is no urgent need for a huge number of very expensive air superiority fighters, becouse there are no forces to pose a serious threat.

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So, technically, nobody knows what's "technically" wrong with the F-35. So people are critics of the only things they know about, the financial, political, managerial stuff. This should have been a "black" project, LOL!

Its not treason by any means to discuss the hardships the program has. It is, however, proprietary to LM and the program, and why public relations departments exist.

If one would like to get some idea of what problems exist in the F-35 program one can go to the GAO website and read the last report which itself references the JET which Sec Gates stated in testimony last week was the new standard used to structure the program instead of what the program had been saying the past few years.

There is pretty much nothing wrong with the aircraft so far- at least in the public domain. The test program is far behind due to lack of aircraft delivery from LM. The program office was badly run and issued poor projections and the program head was just replaced. The program has been restructured and the flight test program has had 13 months added to it.

Exactly what the F-35 is going to to cost is an open question at this point. That itself is a cause of problems. Moreover, USAF force structure is being downsized according to the QDR and according to Sec Gates in recent public testimony the USAF will not be replacing legacy aircraft 1 to 1 with the F-35. So the constantly used number of 1,763 USAF F-35A's is clearly wrong- however, there are no new projections at this time.

The program having problems, Sec Gates calls it "troubled", is not the same as the aircraft having problems. That said the flight test program is so far behind any potential problems that testing would uncover are yet to be discovered. One might observe that one fundamental problem is pushing to get production aircraft in service prior to completion of the test program. Some would describe this as extremely poor planning that should result in significant added cost and others will point out there's more than just flight testing and things will turn out better than is imagined. The next few years will be both interesting and instructive.

Here is Sweetman's take on it.

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/ ... led%202010

exec wrote:

sewerrat wrote:

What is wrong with the F-35 is everything. Its not an air superiority fighter

LOL! It was never meant to be an air superiority fighter!

sewerrat wrote:

With a scant 180 airframes of the -22, and the new gen of Sukhoi rolling out, keeping the geopolitcal situation out of the question, the USAF is in deep crap.

Yeah, USAF is in a deep crap. Why? Becouse they have ~180 Raptors and will have several hundreds F-35's when the first T-50 enters service. How much T-50 are they going to buy? 250? It will be good if they can afford half of that.
Deap crap isn't it? Rolling Eyes

sewerrat wrote:

Its an air superiority fighter and has passive sensors and stealth to be able to pick off our 'stealth' fighters.

I has nothing. No radar yet, no passive sensors, no RHAWS, no engines. Nothing is ready.

sewerrat wrote:

The rest of the world is going for pure fighters, and the US is now for the first time in my life actually ad purposefully fielding garbage.

You're so wrong. F-35 is going to be great strike fighter, much better than the F-16. Better radar, IRIST, DAS, sensor fusion, stealth, greater range... and you claim it's a crap - just becouse it was not designed to be an air superiority fighter. The Cold War is over. Soviet Union is dead. There is no risk of a global conflict(at the moment). There is no urgent need for a huge number of very expensive air superiority fighters, becouse there are no forces to pose a serious threat.

Who knows how many Sukhois the Russians will buy. BUT, don't you think now that they have capitalized on capitolism that they will export it, and don't you then believe that the total number of Sukhoi airframes isn't going to vastly out number the -22? My friends, there will be far more Sukhoi's than Raptors flying the friendly skies.

Global politics aside, when throughout history has the USAF had an inferior force compared to the rest of the world? This is what disturbs me.

I will say that the -35 can replace the F-15. But that is only because its a 40 year old airplane! The threats have changed a lot in 40 years, so thats not saying a whole lot about the F-35; just because it will be better than the F-15. Hell, the Eurofighter is better than the F-15 for that matter.

As a light strike fighter, the F-35 will be good at its job. But air superiority, in the next 10 years, is going to slip from our hands. What will people be saying when Iran and Egypt and India and Russia have a total of 4x the number of Sukhois than the US has of Raptors? Hell, what if China if allowed to purchase the Sukhoi?

Air superiorty is what makes a military super power an actual super power. A bunch of light attack fighters against a lot of the new Sukhoi's is not a good scenario for the US. If only the folks in DC would have kept the Raptor line open for another 3 or 4 years. . .

These are troubline times for the US. Obama is turning NASA into an agency to promote the myth of global warming. What was a space exploration agency is now to become a mouthpiece for the socialist environmental nuts. And the USAF is giving up on air superiority.

What the frack happened to us?

Hopefully we have enough reverse engineered flying saucers in our secret base under Gitmo to make up for what we're doing in the white-world.

sewerrat wrote:

Who knows how many Sukhois the Russians will buy.

They say 200-250, but I don't know if they even menage to buy half of that. They just don't have enough money, period.

sewerrat wrote:

and don't you then believe that the total number of Sukhoi airframes isn't going to vastly out number the -22?

Does it matter? Is it going to be a problem if Indians will buy ~200 Sukhois? I don't think they're a threat.

sewerrat wrote:

Global politics aside, when throughout history has the USAF had an inferior force compared to the rest of the world?

That is not going to change. F-22 will probably be much better than T-50.

sewerrat wrote:

But air superiority, in the next 10 years, is going to slip from our hands.

Not going to happen. Why would US lose air superiority?

sewerrat wrote:

What will people be saying when Iran and Egypt and India and Russia have a total of 4x the number of Sukhois than the US has of Raptors?

Not going to happen.

sewerrat wrote:

Air superiorty is what makes a military super power an actual super power. A bunch of light attack fighters against a lot of the new Sukhoi's is not a good scenario for the US.

Try to understand, there is no real scenario that involves a global conflict where Russian/Indian Sukhois would have clashed with the F-22s. But yes, conflicts like Afg or Iraq are going to happen in the future. So...

sewerrat wrote:

If only the folks in DC would have kept the Raptor line open for another 3 or 4 years. . .

Why to spend money now when you know, that there is not going to be any competition (fully operational) in the next ~15-20 years?

Look:

Do you what is happening in the year 2026?
...always one step ahead.

Elite 1K Joined: May 26, 2005 - 08:39 PM Posts: 1496

imispgh wrote:

Guysmiley wrote:

fiskerwad wrote:

imispgh wrote:

The F-35 has major software problems

http://www.f-16.net/news_article3635.html

I never worked software for the F-35 but on other programs, we did not base our software performance on lawsuits. No one would believe the complexities involved in testing software for military use. Unlike Microsoft, we do not send the program out for the users to test and debug.
fisk

Ha! Good point. "Before pulling the eject handle would you like to submit this error report to Lockheed Martin?"

Did you read the FCA? The suit states Lockheed abandon it's own SW architecture safety and quality standards, created and unsafe architecture and code and lied to the government and said they did meet the standards. If you are going to push back that's fine but read the information and pusb back on point not with some general 30,000ft comment that looks like something but is really a strawman.

Address SEER 1 and the other specifc points please.

You mean the sour grapes suit from a former employee? Has any evidence been presented? Stuff that strawman right up your touchy a@#, dude. I can file suit claiming that the IRS is using alien mind control beams to make my neighbor's dog bark at 3:00 AM. Does that make it true?

Meanwhile the prototypes miraculously somehow keep flying... Apparently it must be sheer luck that keeps every F-35 in existence from spontaneously bursting into flames.

sewerrat wrote:

Obama is turning NASA into an agency to promote the myth of global warming. What was a space exploration agency is now to become a mouthpiece for the socialist environmental nuts.

Yeah....politics stayed 'aside' for all of three paragraphs before you found your soapbox.

Here's something to think about:

Two points of view:

1. Global Warming is real
2. Global warming is a myth (as you so delicately put it).

Two possible reactions:

A. Do something about it now (reduce emission being the first step)
B. Don't do anything about it (keep deferring doing anything about it for 20+years by peddling the 'myth' line)

Now, create an outcome matrix for the above. Regardless of your opining, there's only one real solution.

Feel free to PM me if you want to keep further soapboxing off the board.

Back on topic, and sorry for the interruption, but

sewerrat wrote:

...air superiority, in the next 10 years, is going to slip from our hands.

seems to me like a gross-oversimplification of one possible outcome. Policy makers and military strategists have been trying to predict the future since day 1 and here you are skipping 10 years into the future and deducting that one (that's 1 single) test flight by one protoype of a long-awaited aircraft, missing major elements of its supposed production build (radar and engines to mention but two) and for which no firm export orders are in place,is somehow a guarantee of the loss of US air dominance?

Pray tell, what technical and political and economic information are you in possession of that allows you to make such an unprecedented leap in capability assessment?

Geez, Pecker, what the heck!? How dare you try to employ actual logic!?

- There were weight issues with the B model which has been addressed by the SWAT programme
- There were some structural issues with the C model (no idea to what extend they have been resolved
- There were issues with the F-135 engine and the STOVL drive which might have been resolved to a large extend
- The electrical generator had to be redesigned as it wasn't powerful enough
- The heat dumping system was problematic and might not be fully resolved by now
- Software development runs behind schedule and there are those reports about reliability/safety standards not being met
- Suppliers were late in supplying some components on time

This is all I can remember out of my head.

i guess its common with all up and coming programs but, weve had issues with bad parts and tooling issues.

sewerrat wrote:

Who knows how many Sukhois the Russians will buy. BUT, don't you think now that they have capitalized on capitolism that they will export it, and don't you then believe that the total number of Sukhoi airframes isn't going to vastly out number the -22? My friends, there will be far more Sukhoi's than Raptors flying the friendly skies.

Global politics aside, when throughout history has the USAF had an inferior force compared to the rest of the world? This is what disturbs me.

I will say that the -35 can replace the F-15. But that is only because its a 40 year old airplane! The threats have changed a lot in 40 years, so thats not saying a whole lot about the F-35; just because it will be better than the F-15. Hell, the Eurofighter is better than the F-15 for that matter.

As a light strike fighter, the F-35 will be good at its job. But air superiority, in the next 10 years, is going to slip from our hands. What will people be saying when Iran and Egypt and India and Russia have a total of 4x the number of Sukhois than the US has of Raptors? Hell, what if China if allowed to purchase the Sukhoi?

Air superiorty is what makes a military super power an actual super power. A bunch of light attack fighters against a lot of the new Sukhoi's is not a good scenario for the US. If only the folks in DC would have kept the Raptor line open for another 3 or 4 years. . .

The point you're forgetting is that the F-35 is designed to be second only to the F-22 in a2a. The T-50 has hardly proven itself yet either in capabilities or quantity that will be in service. It is highly highly unlikely that the USAF will ever be fighting the RuAF, especially over Russian soil, so the next likeliest thing you could worry about is nations to whom the T-50 has been exported. As of right now, only the Indian Air Force is talking about acquiring them(and it's highly unlikely that the USAF will ever go to war with them either). So, that leaves whatever other nations that may eventually get T-50s(which will be in the 2020s at least, by which time the US Military will have over 1500 5th Gen fighters, that will be in upgraded blocks). The Chinese J-XX, will be a more likely threat aircraft, whenenver it materializes.

Forum: F-35 Lightning II

what has actually gone wrong with the F-35?