Forum: F-35 Lightning II

Salute!

TNX, Spaz. We are on the same page.

I have been thru three planes at their beginning. Two were developed and flown in combat within 5 years. The third went from prototype to IOC in about 8 or 9 years - the Viper.

I fully understand all the nuances and politics and technical issues.

I do not understand why the "A" is not already here at Eglin.

The jet seems well enough along to have some here finishing up the test sorties and gaining some feel for operating at someplace other than Edwards or Ft Worth.

IMHO, Sec Gates, et al should repeat over and over that the "A" and the "C" are coming online ASAP. Looks like the first production birds are being cranked out and there is nothing wrong with a few flying here as the final bugs are worked out.

The aero and LO and the basic systems like FLCS, motors, armament bays, nav and comm systems, et al look good to go. But I have a bad feeling that we are waiting for the "perfect" jet and not going as another source suggested. I flew the basic Block 1 Viper, then the Block 5, 10 and 15. We gained better avionics and such along the way. We also had a very effective little jet that could go to war "as is".

I pray that the motor issue and the "B" model do not provide ammo to those who want to go back to the future and make the F-35 so expensive and have questionable capabilities that the program completely fails.

Gums sends...

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One of the issues with Eglin not getting it's jets till later this year is that a few years back they canceled a test jet (AF-5 IIRC) and now have to replace it with the two jets from LRIP1 temporarily. That, and they decided to forgo making corrections to Blk0.5 and incorporate the needed changes into Blk1 thereby changing the initial training Blk from 0.5 to 1.

lb wrote:

The 16 fighter wings in the QDR include the reserve and guard.

wrightwing wrote:

How many wings and attrition birds will the Air Force Reserve, and Air National Guard have?
There's more than just active duty units receiving new aircraft.

Well 72x16=1152, then according to your 50-55% additional birds for training, attrition, works out to 1728(at 50%), and 1785(at 55%), and 1763 falls in between those figures.

That's 16 total fighter wings. Including the F-22 and it's follow on replacement, the F-15E wings, any future strike UCAS wings (the USAF is not going to just let the USN put them in service), there is not room in the force structure for 16 wings of F-35's and that assumes the force structure remains as planned in the QDR which in this budget climate is not a good bet.

The actual breakdown in the QDR is 10 strike fighter wings and 6 air superiority wings. It's very difficult to see how within the terms of the QDR ever having more than 12 F-35 wings and given one or two wings with a future strike UCAS one should assume 10 or 11 F-35 wings or 1,100 to 1,200 aircraft. That also includes no future cuts to force structure.

Forum: F-35 Lightning II

Pentagon F-35 chief sees no change in total buy