F-35 Flies Against F-16 In Basic Fighter Maneuvers

[krorvik]

As basher54321 says, the test was not specifically for that single airframe - it was just the vehicle.

The F-35 is rather unique in that many airframes are built as testing goes along - so fixes during testing can be retro-applied on all airframes as they are OK'ed. This is partially a lesson from earlier projects, both the F-18 and F-16 have had many problems (engines, landing gear, software, radars... the list is long but distinguished ) in their early years, and some problems are still present.

The F-35 places a modern approach on this, and allows for smaller and more frequent upgrades along the way. This is actually not that different from modern software development, where releases are more frequent - with smaller "payloads" - and thus easier to test and control. At the same time, the F-35 is very much software controlled. Thus, it enables testing in parallell with production. This is, of course, not coincidental. Software people call it "continuous delivery". JPO calls it concurrency.

And, it is what enables LM to use an early airframe to test and evaluate, and apply fixes to *all* airframes that have been built later. And probably AF-1 too

[spazsinbad]

[steve2267]

I get all that. I went back and re-read the report. It sounded like the pilot had identified some areas where CLAW could be improved, such as waiting until AOA = 30° before blending the flight controls, some areas where the flight controls were not intuitive (e.g. left/right stick should roll, and rudder pedals should yaw).

Now johnwills noted recently that with the F-35 FLCS CLAW, left/right stick rolls the aircraft around the flight path vector (FPV), not the aircraft longitudinal axis. As you get up over 20° alpha, I could sure see how command roll will also produce a yaw around the aircraft z-axis because roll around FPV will resolve into roll around aircraft longitudinal and yaw axes. But given the experience level of the test pilot noted in the report, I would have expected that pilot to be familiar with this fact.

Given how 'Dolbe' Hanche has been very positive about the aircraft, as all pilots have been -- including the Venable report from the Heritage Foundation, and statements from LM test pilots (Beesley et al) extolling the kinematic performance of the aircraft, I thought the results of this test would have fed into tweaks of the FLCS CLAWs.

What I am hearing in reply is "not so much". Which is fine. I'll just have to wait to read about how the CLAWs matured over the SDD / IOC phase of the life of the aircraft.

[jessmo111]

Ok can someone explain this Grinder thing? I saw an attractive woman, and heard grind, so my attention was lost.

[spazsinbad]

WOW! WOT a long thread and youse thought it was DEAD. NOPE - here we go again - with a TWIST at the END - all good....

F-35 once lost to F-16s, and how it made a stunning comeback
19 Apr 2017 Alex Lockie

"The F-35 represents the US Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps’ vision for the future of combat aviation, but in 2015 a damning report detailed how the Joint Strike Fighter had lost in dogfights with F-16s and F-15s [wut nope just one report on one flight with one F-16 & no F-15s but ex-F-15 pilot in the test F-35] — the very planes the F-35 intended to replace.

Essentially it came down to energy management in the early days of the F-35 program, according to the report....

...according to Dan Flatley, the Marine Maj. US Marine Corps (Ret.) who helped design the training syllabus for F-35 dogfights, the F-35’s lacklustre performance against legacy jets had more to do with old habits of the pilots and a weapons system in its infancy rather than anything wrong with the F-35 concept itself.

“When you first get in the F-35 and try to fight it visually, you immediately go back to everything you knew in your legacy fighter,” Flatley told Business Insider in a phone interview....

...“If you try to fight it like a fighter, it isn’t. You’re going to have terrible results,” Flatley said of the F-35. Like any new weapons system, the F-35 takes some getting used to. In 2015, F-35 pilots were pulled from other fighters and introduced to a plane that fundamentally reimagined aerial warfare. A learning curve ensued....

...Flatley said he did approach Lockheed Martin to suggest changes to the jet after its poor run against legacy aircraft.

One attribute the F-35 has that counter-intuitively helps it in dogfights is its ability to slow down during a turn, but it was during these slow turns that pilots weren’t able to control the plane how they were used to.

Basically, the engineers at Lockheed Martin built the F-35’s flight controls with an incredible amount of automation, which Flatley said could make the jet “feel like it was fighting you,” or “feel like the hand of god pushing you in certain directions.”

Flatley and the other F-35 pilots needed the ability to push their aeroplane right to the edge of its abilities, almost to the point where it would fall right out of the sky due to hitting slow speeds at insane angles, should they need to in a do-or-die dogfight.

“You guys are hand holding us,” Flatley told the engineers, who hadn’t imagined the fighter pilot’s need to push the limits of their aircraft.

“We want more authority. I want to be able to throw my nose around if I need to,” said Flatley, referring to the plane’s ability to point its front end at threats in order to better assess and target them.

So Lockheed Martin worked with the pilots and fixed the issues keeping them from aceing dogfights, as they do now. Since that test, the F-35’s record speaks for itself. During Red Flag, the US Air Force’s most realistic, challenging jet fighter training event, the F-35 came out with a stunning 20-1 kill ratio on the legacy aircraft that had once beaten it.

Flatly, who came from an F/A-18 background, said he had to shake the old habits he formed in an aircraft that was originally conceptualized in the 1970s, but young pilots training today won’t have those problems, and could revolutionise the way the F-35 fights.

“The next generation, the first Lieutenants that have never flown an F-18 before, those are the pilots that are going to define what the F-35 is going to do,” said Flatley."

PHOTO: https://static.businessinsider.com/imag ... /image.jpg

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/f-35 ... ack-2017-4

[playloud]

Wow. It's almost like they learned something from that TEST.

[armedupdate]

But..but....short wings! No wing, turn! Looks fat!

[popcorn]

Just needed to sharpen it's CLAWS.

[spazsinbad]

"TIGER, tiger, burning bright. In the skies of the night..."

"..In what distant deeps or skies,
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?...

...Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyger

[Corsair1963]

WASHINGTON — According to some reports, America's fifth-generation stealth aircraft doesn't excel at dogfighting.

But fortunately, the F-35 Lightning II is not built for dogfighting.

While some analysts have argued that the air-to-air-combat capabilities of the F-35A won't match some of its peer aircraft, pilots who spoke to Business Insider pointed out that the US's fifth-generation fighter is designed in such a way that dogfighting may be an afterthought.

"If you were to engage an F-35 in say, a visual dogfight capability," US Air Force Brig. Gen. Scott Pleus began, "the capabilities of the F-35 are absolutely eye-watering compared to a fourth-generation fighter."

"The airplane has unbelievable maneuvering characteristics that make it completely undefeatable in an air-to-air environment," said Pleus, who has 153 flight hours in the F-35A and is the director of the F-35 integration office.

"So if it's a long-range contact, you'll never see me and you'll die, and if it's within visual-range contact you'll see me and you're gonna die and you're gonna die very quickly."



Pleus, a former commander of the 56th Fighter Wing at Luke Air Force Base and a command pilot with just north of 2,200 flight hours, F-35 "is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else in the world today."

"The best thing about flying against an F-35, from the F-35 perspective is, you never knew I was there," US Air Force Brig. Gen. Scott Pleus, director of the F-35 integration office, told Business Insider.

"You literally would never know I'm there,"

"I flew the F-35 against other fourth-generation platforms and we killed them and they never even saw us."

-----
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/arguing-w ... 00069.html

[spazsinbad]

I'll do a resurrection shuffle here with options for any number of other dogfight threads but this one is specifically titled.

MP3 excerpt - podcast: 078 - F-35 Lightning II [Hamilton 12 Apr 2020] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-Sr4xqZKkw

Only Graphic: download/file.php?id=32722&t=1 [9.5Mb .MP3 5min 10sec sound file BELOW THIS GRAPHIC!]