F-16.net

Corsair1963 wrote:The F-15EX sounds pretty dead to me....

mixelflick wrote:

Corsair1963 wrote:The F-15EX sounds pretty dead to me....

On a logical basis, sure. But not when the AIr Force's top uniformed officer is spinning fairy tales about how buying the F-15EX "won't take away from the F-35 buy".

PLEASE.

weasel1962 wrote:F-35 program status (US only excl intl) as at today per budget. Yellow = projected.

weasel1962 wrote:Super hornet program status as at today. Last column refers to Super hornets only, not necessarily EA-18G although there was significant overlap.

F-35C Readiness Rises, Navy Fighter Shortfall Fades [LLOOOOOOONNG Article BEST READ at SOURCE]
10 Apr 2019 Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

"...On Navy and Marine Corps F-35s, “we are seeing readiness rates increase, commensurate to what we’re seeing on other aviation platforms,” Geurts [acquisition chief {of what?}] told reporters after an upbeat hearing with the Senate seapower subcommittee. “Our mission readiness rates when deployed … have been very good.”

Specifically for the Navy’s first squadron of carrier-based F-35Cs, VFA-147 (the Argonauts), “we’ve seen anywhere from 60 percent MC [mission capable] to 80 percent MC, depending on the day,” testified Rear Adm. Scott Conn, director of Air Warfare (OPNAV N98) on the Navy’s Pentagon staff. Now, that’s with just seven airplanes, Conn cautioned, which means one plane doing unusually well or poorly can have an outsize impact on the overall figure.

For comparison, the overall F-35 fleet, most of it Air Force, is hovering around 60 percent availability (not exactly the same measuring as Mission Capable). But F-35s at the Red Flag wargames were able to hit 90 percent. So getting a specific high-priority unit to high readiness is not the problem: It’s scaling up such small-scale successes to the fleet as a whole — even as that fleet is growing.

“We know the aircraft can be reliable and can be maintained, and maintained in an austere environment,” Geurts told reporters. “We’ve just got to be able to continue to do that at scale across the entire fleet as the fleet grows.”

So, I asked, are these just the kind of teething troubles typical for any new aircraft? It’s more complicated than that, Geurts said, because of the sheer scale and complexity of the F-35 program.

“The unique challenge to F-35 is [we’re] ramping up very quickly in production,” Geurts said. With three US services and 11 foreign partners — no longer counting Turkey — “the good news is demand is high for the aircraft and folks are flying the aircraft with lots of hours,” he went on. “The challenge for the enterprise is to be able grow production rates and be able to sustain the growing fleet, simultaneously.” That requires growing the supply system to match, he said, as well as “making some adjustments to ALIS.”

Compare those comments with Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson’s publicly savaging the Autonomic Logistics Information System as “so frustrating to use, maintainers said they were wasting 10-15 hours a week fighting with it … and looking for ways to bypass it to try to make F-35s mission capable.”

Why’s the Navy so much calmer about these problems? In part, because they haven’t bet the farm on F-35. The Air Force basically stopped buying fighters in the 1990s to wait for so-called fifth generation aircraft that, unlike the “wobblin’ goblin” F-117, combined stealth with high performance: first the F-22, cut from 381 planes to 179, and then the F-35A, of which the Air Force plans to buy 1,763. The Marines, similarly, decided to keep their old AV-8 Harriers and F-18 Hornets until the F-35B jump jet model came along. But the Navy developed a new non-stealthy aircraft, a radically upgraded F-18 known as the Super Hornet, and they’ve kept buying new ones ever since.

With the Pentagon now forcing the Air Force to buy an upgraded version of the non-stealthy F-15 Eagle, the Navy’s looking pretty smart....



Source:

weasel1962 wrote:Decided to address some of the fake news with the below extract from FY 2020 budget.

"The F-15C/D Service Life Extension Program (SLEP) for the Longeron addresses a potential safety of flight issue and is required to support the fleet required service life to 2045....Program procuring 234 Longeron Kits."

F-15EX vs. F-35A [Four Pages with this entire article including graphic from May Magazine is attached below]
May 2019 John A. Tirpak

"Two jets from different eras, with different missions, strengths, and weaknesses, face off in a battle for today’s funds.

The F-35 Lightning has been the Air Force’s sole new fighter program since 2009, when the F-22 Raptor program was prematurely terminated. While behind schedule, the program has been a top Air Force priority for more than a decade and until recently, was expected to remain USAF’s only fighter program until a future capability, still undefined, comes online.

Now the F-35 faces a new challenge from an old jet design, a variant of the F-15 Strike Eagle; an airplane from an earlier era, built for a different mission. Though the Air Force denies it, the two jets are competing for inevitably limited dollars within the service’s fighter portfolio....

...While the Air Force has maintained since 2001 that it will not buy any “new old” fighters, and that it needs to transition as quickly as possible to an all-5th-gen force, proponents argue that buying F-15s and F-35s concurrently would fill gaps in the fighter fleet more rapidly. Moreover, USAF leaders, defending the new F-15 buy, have said that the F-35 still hasn’t proven it can be maintained at the advertised cost (comparable to the F-16, at about $20,000 per hour) and the service prefers to wait to make large bulk buys of the airplane after the Block 4 version starts rolling off the assembly line in the mid-2020s. This approach, they say, will also avoid spending large amounts of money to update earlier versions of the F-35 to the Block 4 configuration.…

...the F-15EX requires almost no new development, would be able to execute a test program very quickly, and requires minimal additional development.

Air Force officials say one potential mission for the F-15EX would be carrying “outsize” munitions, such as hypersonic missiles, and as a possible standoff weapons magazine working in conjunction with the F-22.

The F-35 and F-15EX were designed in different eras for different missions.

The F-15C was designed for air superiority in the pre-stealth era; the F-35 to be the battlefield “quarterback,” gathering vast amounts of information from behind enemy lines while executing stealthy strikes and picking off enemy fighters. Yet, as Congress decides how to invest in future aircraft, comparisons are necessary as the two planes compete for resources...."

Graphic: http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArch ... al.v30.pdf

Source: http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArch ... -35A-.aspx

spazsinbad wrote:

F-15EX vs. F-35A

doge wrote:

spazsinbad wrote:

F-15EX vs. F-35A

3.8mm!! !? wow