Forum: General F-35 Forum

river_otter wrote:

sferrin wrote:

Both the Blackbird and XB-70 went from proposal to flight in less time, and they had far more difficult hurdles to overcome. We've just gotten lazy/incompetent.

In fairness, they didn't overcome their hurdles. The Blackbird just offered such mindblowing performance in its narrow mission profile that we were willing to overlook all its remaining problems so that we could have it around to do that one mission. It was hideously expensive to build and operate, had a long turnaround time between missions, required its own tanker fleet full of special fuel, routinely lit its ground crew on fire (known risk, the affected crew wore fire-resistant suits, and the only known injury from it was a broken arm when an inexperienced hose crew sprayed someone on fire down too early and knocked him off the plane), was extremely difficult to fly, could do nothing but fly in a fairly straight line alongside its target to take pictures, and while none was ever shot down it had a proportionately high number that were lost to accidents.

It did what it was designed to do and met it's requirements. That's called success. If the requirement was to do it on a shoestring budget, with standard fuel, and a short turn around time then yeah, it failed. Were those it's requirements? Nope.

river_otter wrote:

The U-2 it was supposed to replace has outlived it in service.

Which is no reflection on the Blackbird. You hardly need a Blackbird to see what the Taliban are doing.

river_otter wrote:

And the XB-70 never became the B-70 because by the time it was ready to, the SAM threat had degraded its ability to perform its bombing mission at all.

You might want to inform B-1B and B-52 pilots that they are unable to drop bombs. I think they'd be surprised.

river_otter wrote:

Similarly with the B-58 Hustler; it overcame its hurdles and went into production but had an extremely short service life.

Because it was expensive. Not because it failed to do what was asked of it.

river_otter wrote:

Most of the past successes were at best qualified successes. "Successful" because we defined success as "doing one thing well" and overlooking the rest.

One can hardly expect an aircraft to be successful in a role for which it was not designed. That'd be as dumb as calling the A-10 a "qualified success" because it can't intercept Foxbats.

river_otter wrote:

It's only when you start getting to the F-15, F-16, and F-18 that we start seeing something approaching the modern perfectionistic approach to aircraft design.

Hardly. The F-15 had it's airbrake redesigned, it's wingtips clipped, and the sawtooth added to it's stab. The F-16 had too small a stab, no BVR missiles, and limited night capability. The F/A-18 and Super Hornet both had issues.

river_otter wrote:

And the F-15 had in its day the same basic delays and cost overruns we're seeing in today's aircraft. But look at what the F-15's success has been because we took the time and spent the money to get it right.

In this you are correct. Every generation has its uninformed detractors that criticize it because it's not as cheap or simple as the last one. Believe it or not you still see the Fighter Mafia idiots trolling around complaining about aircraft complexity. As if aircraft are complex because we like them that way. Rolling Eyes

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river_otter - Northrup has participating in substantial black programs for the past decade. I think there's plenty of potential there for the necessary technologies.

Really, given the electronic developments elsewhere, the only thing that the LRS-B needs which is new is a stealthy airframe. There, one has to look at the new and low drag airframes for guidance. If a team has done the necessary background work to develop such an airframe, then the remaining tasks are much lighter. I bet the RFP will stress the need for very high technology readiness. But, if this program succeeds or not remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that the LRS-B is a strategic imperative for the USAF. I would call it more important than the F-35, as a matter of fact. But that's a discussion about opinion.

As for accepting planes with flaws, that has hurt previous programs. But on the other hand, those planes actually flew and were developed within much shorter time frame than is acceptable today. The F-35 is trying to get all of its systems integration done before it enters service, it is looking at a two decade development cycle. There are definite costs associated with getting planes that can do everything well, and one of the biggest is budget overruns and long time lags.

And the F-15, actually, the USAF followed a much more standard spiral approach with that than you would think. The plane started off as a pure interceptor and was only later pushed into bombing roles.

I personally think that the LRS-B short development cycle has three driving factors
1) The most successful USAF programs in the past decade have been UAVs. Those have had much shorter development times and much narrower capabilities focus. On the other hand, the F-35 and the F-22 both went over budget and behind schedule. The USAF naturally wants to try something different and see if it can replicate other successes. (If it'll work is another matter)
2) By forcing a super short time-frame, the USAF may hope to avoid feature and technology creep / overreaches by demanding near immediate results.
3) Northrup Grumman has a near perfected design, which can quickly go into flight testing and later on into production (This one is pure conjecture, but I think it is a pretty safe guess.)

Back in the 80's the auto industry discovered that by reducing the develop time-line you reduced the cost of the vehicle. There is merit in creating a fast paced program but it takes engineering and project management discpline. Additionally in the auto industry technology development is separated from vehicle design. When a vehicle is designed the engineers can go to the shelf and select fully developed systems and subsystems for he vehicle. Examples are the development of engine familities and even common structural assemblies.

sferrin wrote:

river_otter wrote:

sferrin wrote:

Both the Blackbird and XB-70 went from proposal to flight in less time, and they had far more difficult hurdles to overcome. We've just gotten lazy/incompetent.

In fairness, they didn't overcome their hurdles. ...

It did what it was designed to do and met it's requirements. That's called success. If the requirement was to do it on a shoestring budget, with standard fuel, and a short turn around time then yeah, it failed. Were those it's requirements? Nope.

Great! Let's just downgrade the paper requirements for the F-35 to what it can do today, call it a success, and move on! It'll be nice to know we don't have to worry about re-designing the lift fan door hinges, because we're changing the requirements to replacing them every 300 flight hours like a Sukhoi's engines.

Reality: the Blackbird and XB-70 had monumentally smaller sets of requirements than today's fighter-bombers, and those requirements were written with the knowledge that they were barely meetable in the first place, so any and sundry other problems were to be tolerated. And we wound up with two planes that, while impressive in the extreme as long as we asked nothing more of them ever, were very troublesome and barely (or in the XB-70's case, more likely not at all) affordable for their missions. (I actually regard the Blackbird as a near-complete success; it's just a terrible example of a very unique situation where the requirements really were that narrow in scope and generous to the plane's faults. It never was able to enter service as the F-12 interceptor, a fact that fails to diminish it largely because the F-12 requirements were mostly a cover story for what the Blackbird was actually doing. And the M-12 mothership was unable to use the D-21 camera drones mostly because the D-21s didn't work.)

Do you seriously think that if the F-35 were simply allowed to light its ground crew on fire from time to time, that heads wouldn't roll? We have people kvetching about a theoretical (and probably not factual) need to put down more heat-resistant runway material. We got things done faster in the past, because in the most troubling periods of the Cold War we were willing to overlook horrible problems we wouldn't tolerate today. The result is that today's planes may take longer to develop by some margin, but they also out-fight their fast-developed predecessors by a wider margin.

sferrin wrote:

river_otter wrote:

And the XB-70 never became the B-70 because by the time it was ready to, the SAM threat had degraded its ability to perform its bombing mission at all.

You might want to inform B-1B and B-52 pilots that they are unable to drop bombs. I think they'd be surprised.

Badly phrased on my part. It could have served as a bomber, basically speaking. But with its speed giving it ultimately very little extra protection from then-modern SAMs than a B-52, at considerably more cost and lower payload, why? The XB-70 was a very successful X-project at making a prototype aircraft with specific performance characteristics. It never was, and would not have been, a successful bomber design.

The B-1B entirely proves that point. The impressive performance of the XB-70 at high speeds and high altitudes gave way to a less fast but more capable B-1A, and then to a more capable and affordable (if much slower) B-1B, which is the only one that made it into production. We never did build the B-70, or even a production B-1A. We built and use the very successful B-1B, which meets basically none of the requirements the XB-70 was built to meet. But which does the actual mission(s) required of it in the real world.

sferrin wrote:

river_otter wrote:

Similarly with the B-58 Hustler; it overcame its hurdles and went into production but had an extremely short service life.

Because it was expensive. Not because it failed to do what was asked of it.

Exactly my point. You enshrine a broken procurement model like it's what has to be. The paper requirements are nothing but words on a page. Write them simple, to allow fast development, and you wind up with a fast-developed product that meets a limited set of written requirements (in the B-58's case, high-speed, high-altitude nuclear strike), but maybe doesn't fit the real-world need (high-speed, low-altitude penetration strike bombing at a reasonable cost).

sferrin wrote:

river_otter wrote:

Most of the past successes were at best qualified successes. "Successful" because we defined success as "doing one thing well" and overlooking the rest.

One can hardly expect an aircraft to be successful in a role for which it was not designed. That'd be as dumb as calling the A-10 a "qualified success" because it can't intercept Foxbats.

The B-25, F8U, F-4, B-52, Boeing 727, C-130, F-15, F-16, and F/A-18 all do things they weren't designed to do. The AC-130 gunship was never part of the original spec, the F/A-18 was not originally intended to be the Navy's carrier-based airborn tanker, and the F-15 and (at least Y)F-16 were specifically designed not to be usable as bombers. So does the A-10 (it was designed to provide CAS against mechanized forces, not support ground troops against illiterate infantry savages with rusty machine guns and pipe bombs). Those planes were extra-successful. The planes that history, with full benefit of hindsight, has considered to have been successful are (mostly) the ones that went way beyond their original requirements. Successful designs are those that either did their mission so well that they were never really forced to do it (not a plane but the Ohio class subs for sure; maybe the F-22; probably the B-2 though mostly not in the way originally intended) or those that were flexible enough to do their mission whatever that mission became. Or rarities like the Blackbird where the mission really was what it was originally thought to be. The A-10's mission was never going to become shooting down Foxbats, but when it changed to infantry support against infantry the plane was able. What you're arguing is the opposite. That a plane needn't be able to do actual parts of its actual mission, as long as it met the theoretical way some bean counters described the performance needed to do what they thought the mission was.

sferrin wrote:

In this you are correct. Every generation has its uninformed detractors that criticize it because it's not as cheap or simple as the last one. Believe it or not you still see the Fighter Mafia idiots trolling around complaining about aircraft complexity. As if aircraft are complex because we like them that way. Rolling Eyes

That very complexity makes it impossible to get the planes designed and through trouble-shooting as fast as we used to. It's not laziness or incompetence, it's that we're designing better planes than we used to, but still have to do that using Mk. I people as the designers and testers.

river_otter: not only is the F-35 going to be 10 years behind schedule, its delay will put the USAF tactical air into an incredible squeeze. The USAF will be flying an older and wearier force well into the 2020s because of the F-35's pursuit of near perfection at launch.

If the USAF went for airframe first, and only later pursued sensor fusion, the F-35 would have started at a lower technological level. I bet the DAS system probably wouldn't work and the plane would not have a good EW and A2A mode. But, it would be flying and would be a worthy replacement for the F-117. Later versions could complete the technological developments.

(Think of it this way: having a half good F-35 in the next ten years is better than what the USAF is currently facing)

Because of the problem the USAF is facing with the F-35, it is completely understandable that the USAF may want to try a different development program this time. (ie use purely 'off the shelf' tech and fly ASAP.

Finally, the suggested force size of 200 suggests to me that the USAF expects to loose some.

Getting back to the LRS-B. Has it been confirmed that this is to be a subsonic aircraft, or is that just conjecture?

archeman wrote:

Getting back to the LRS-B. Has it been confirmed that this is to be a subsonic aircraft, or is that just conjecture?

I believe it's just conjecture, since I haven't seen an official line from USAF on the subject. However, this would make a lot of sense- a subsonic aircraft will have lower-thrust engines, and the subsequent advantages in fuel efficiency, cost, and potentially reliability.

Then there's low observability. It's a lot easier to cool the exhaust of something going subsonic than something going supersonic. There's also the usual aerodynamic heating associated with mach numbers greater than 1. That heating can impair sensor operations and raise IR signatures.

An article in Air Force Magazine making the case for the LRS-B. The specifications are not yet finalized. It's a top priority for the AF along with the new tanker and the JSF.
Also mentioned is a new cruise missile for enhanced stand-off capability and superior to JASSM. I wonder if the AF can leverage work that the Navy is doing to develop an air-launched version of it's LRASM?

http://www.airforce-magazine.com/Magazi ... 2time.aspx

The schedule laid out in the AW&ST article on the restricted program Northrup was supposedly working on had the competition in 2010 and start of SDD in 2011 so the time-line works.

Thought there were two LRASM types being pursued by the Navy the first based on the JASSM and a high speed on using the ASLAM airframe and propulsion.

Some have mentioned that they would expect the LRS-B to have at least a supersonic dash capability. Whatever it turns out to be it will be in service until 2070.

Is there any word on LRSB's exportability?

delvo wrote:

Is there any word on LRSB's exportability?

Z.E.R.O Who would need to buy it anyway?

You wouldn't export a B-2 or a B-1 so why start with the LRS-B? Strategic bombers aren't really the type of aircraft that the US needs to be exporting.

About exportability: what if the bomber is really just an over-sized F-111? From the CSBA document, they estimate an ideal size of about 20k lbs internal, which is heavier than the F-111, but not by much. Furthermore, both the F-111 and the Tornado are going out of the services of the Australia and Great Britain, so those two countries will loose a certain measure of their long range strike.

In that case, an export variant wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility. But I think its highly unlikely and, if it does happen, will pretty much only be sold to anglo-sphere countries.

Which reminds me: odds are that France/Britain may look in the future to build their own medium bomber to fill gaps in their air force and to have a competing weapon system for export against the SU-34.

arkadyrenko wrote:

Which reminds me: odds are that France/Britain may look in the future to build their own medium bomber to fill gaps in their air force and to have a competing weapon system for export against the SU-34.

Given the Su-34's 680nm combat radius, I'd say that just about every multi-role fighter already on the international market is a viable competitor. The only advantages really offered by the Su-34 are side-by-side seating and a potty in the back. The Russians also claim that it only costs 35 mil a pop, though I'll believe that when they actually sell copies for that price.

Forum: General F-35 Forum

USAF wants to fast track LRS-B