
https://youtu.be/G0hWzaKEeZo
Scrolled down to the comments and saw that Kurt Plummer was up to his old tricks:
You're all missing several points.
1. The F-16 can be beaten by the Typhoon, Rafale and Su-27/30/35 and F-22. On a good day, at or below 15K, it can be beaten by either Hornet. To say that the F-16 is matched by the F-35 is not a point of pride. It's performance should never have been the threshold bar for a 21st century replacement.
2. One of the several KPPs the F-35 failed was a promise that the jet would AT LEAST MATCH both the sustained turn capability of the F-16 and the instantaneous (alpha pointing) capability of the F/A-18. It does neither. In a situation where OPEVAL is pass/fail and IOT&E is pass/fix, the F-35 never met a key kinematic KPP.
3. Missiles and sensors drive air combat performance, much like bullets and optics drive the metrics of rifles, far more than physical performance.
Without the AIM-9X, which is fitted SOLELY to an outboard pylon because it cannot be bay launched (rail weapon, not ejector) the F-35 loses it's VLO. Without a close-in weapon, the F-35's superior DAS is pointless as indeed, IMO, the Falcon Knight or Falcon Eye could do 90% of what the DAS does, in air combat, (SAIRST and night time thermal visionics) back in the early 90s and would be vastly more reliable, in the present tense where they are effectively stripping the entire system for an untested alternate in the near term.
4. The true measure of an air combat platform's utility lies in it's energy addition because fights are expected to be won, BVR and the outcome of BVR is determined in the intercept phase whereby you control the geometry of the fight by being supersonic, cold, and warping around to an advantaged shot position whereby you are beyond the threat jet's radar cone and contrail expectation band. Whether the final shot is taken BVR or WVR, properly accomplished air combat is a murder, not a duel and the F-35 simply lacks the ability get supersonic, quickly, hold it outside of burner, or get high enough to avoid drawing cons which will increasingly be visible themselves, to modern optronics, even at night.
The F-16C.50, clean at about 30K, has a 29 second acceleration from Mach .85 to 1.2. The F/A-18C with GE-402 engines does the same in about 34 seconds. Again, this is nothing special, today, but formed the KPP range of sprint performances that it was expected the F-35A would fall between. And yet the Lightning is about 8 seconds lagged. The F-35B is 16 seconds slower to accelerate and the F-35C is some 43 seconds longer accelerating than either of the aircraft they are expected to replace.
This is a crucial difference in a jet which is bay-limited to the number and size (depth as well as length) of any BVR weapons it carries and whose 110lb/sqft wingloading prevents it from fighting in the 35-40,000ft regime where the F-22, J-20 and Su-57 are quite comfortable and have a 50% missile pole leverage, at Mach 1.4.
Perhaps most importantly, as the global standard for QWIP staring focal plane array IRST continues to become more and more normed around multi and even hyperspectral pixel densities in excess of 1,500X1,500 detectors, the ability to use burner to achieve and hold supersonic speeds will become less and less tactically relevant. You will be detected in excess of 50nm FQ and 80nm RQ and a high heat signature jet with no RCS return is as good as an IFF tag.
Where having a supersonic shock, prebuilt on the missile as it exits the airframe is equal to about 20% greater missile range in the 1.2 @ FL250 height band, having NO supersonics performance makes the fighter highly questionable in it's effectiveness, especially if it's operating on the wrong side of a 900nm combat radius and has no fuel to spare for dogfighting.
5. Fuel burn and flat-plating the airframe are also problems with dogfighting in a radar controlled threat airspace but when the shot goes wrong and you are nose on committed, sometimes there is no choice. In this, it is true that the F-16 is alpha limited (27.5, clean) and that this number drops a fair bit when cheek and belly stations are loaded. While the F-35 had a nominal ~60` capability and can combine this with helicopter yaw turns and the like. Does this matter? No.
First because, to put significant lateral loads on the pilot is unwise in either case and to be sufficiently slow to do what is shown by the F-35 is to have ZERO energy to defeat a Pyrrhic return shot from either the intended target or an outsider shooter threat. While HOBS capable missiles increasingly don't need the pointed-on sweetening of the shot.
You will notice that the F-35 loses altitude, significantly, in it's pedal turn and realizing that the majority of a stealth assets flight time is going to be at or above 25,000ft, to extend range, remain outside of SHORADS threat bubbles and provide best sensor slant, this becomes a significant vulnerability.
At FL250, the air is half as dense as it is at sea level. Just to maintain MINIMUM beyond-stall lift on the jet requires it to be a third again as fast. This rapidly develops into a situation where there is too much entrance G for the pilot or airframe (note, lateral loads are dangerous for heavy A2G munitions, whether they are freestream or in a weapons bay).
Secondly, the F-35 is going to be fighting at night, under conditions where it is likely carrying only 2 AIM-120 and even if those AMRAAMs are Deltas (with significantly more close-in dogfight performance), it will be foolish to withhold shots until after the radar merge at 10-15nm. If it misses with those shots, at these distances, it should separate and extend. Something which is made easy if the section wingman is providing midcourse guidance updates and the parent fighter can roll and displace, massively, to leave the fight plane.
Fighting at night pushes spatial disorientation and rapid target loss and while DAS can compensate for the latter, it is unwise to get into falling leaf, spinning horizon, conditions 'on purpose', in the primary advantaged condition F-35s can be expected to be fighting an air war with an active DCA threat component: stealth in low visibility.
Third, while some unfortunately equate high alpha with 'agility' as the ability to shoot your own a$$ off under complete control, the reality is that agile is to maneuverable as quick is to fast.
And this is particularly crucial in evaluating the F-16 vs. F-35 comparison in that the F-16 always has roll authority with which to reverse it's loaded turn. And always has speed of entry and sustained energy within the turn to not bleed everything when it does cut back.
This is largely because of the way the RSS design condition sets CofL and CofG harmoniously, allowing a nominally 300ft2 wing area to add another 150ft2 of stab lift as the wing LEF deflect upwards and the tails trim neutral, to supply added lift.
On the F-35, the need to maintain a neutral CL trim displacement in supporting a large weapons bay and STOVL meant small, straight, wings, near the CG.
And for this airframe configuration to not completely ruin transonics performance meant using the intake trunking and belly as 1G neutral lift augments, similar to fat LEX and pushing the heavy engine as far back as possible so that the wings may be similarly aft set and not totally screw up the area ruling.
Unfortunately, this then means that as the alpha comes up the tails immediately have to dig to keep it that way while the intakes and weapons bay area rapidly transition from thick airfoil to speed brake as the variance in effective AOA between the aft set wing and the forebody is considerable.
So that, instead of a complimentary lift curve in which the stabs are free to add roll authority as needed, you have a divergent set of curves which effects additive alpha capability as the authority inherent to the aft controls has to be bled off, more and more, just to keep the nose going up and the glowie bit pointed aft.
The result, as reported by F-35 TPs, is that the jet has a low-transitional-high (blended) AOA limit on the order of 18-20`, 23-25`, 27-30` whereas most modern jets don't begin to seriously self-limit maneuver authority in the high regime now until 35` or more.
While the F-35 can get there as a function of absolute alpha rates, by the time it does so, it's a monorail with the roll and pitch authority to rapidly un-point and recover the jet very slow. This is unacceptable as the standard defensive tactic is to simply roll under, tuck and reverse to spit the other jet out and the F-35 is going to lag on this, so badly that it cannot maintain a dominant position as everything is dedicated to stabilizing the achieved alpha.
Which is why the F-35 shown in the video, while it has similar or even greater total alpha range (square turn) for a given speed, shows an overall less fluid and more sluggish ability to change it's axis of maneuver in a fashion that can best be described as plodding.
Again, the F-35 Test Pilot report which highlights these shortcomings is quite explicit: In the simplest of BFM maneuvering, he not only could not prosecute an F-16D with a GE-100 engine and two wing bubbles but he could not prevent the subsequent threat reversal into his own six.
Where his fancy helmet sight and DAS were useless, due to the tight confines of the canopy and the bulky headrest which kept him from even SEEING the threat to maneuvering, defensively, against the Viper.
Subsequent OFPs have supposedly been released which open out the F-35's performance envelope from an F-101 level 4.5G sustained to something nearer 7Gs, at primary fight heights (the JSF also has severe low level performance limits, thanks to thermal issues).
This is about right for a 470sqft wing maneuvering in the 20-25K region, subsonic.
The F-22 does better, only because it is supercruise capable of generating four or five times the lift off an 840sqft wing area while exploiting TVC to max pitch rates.
The fact remains that the F-35 is not really competitive with ANY fourth gen fighter (excepting, perhaps, the Super Hornet) in the primary regime where it can be expected to fight, as nearly every other jet has the same or similar alpha limits, equal or better thrust to weight and vastly superior, canard-delta, aerodynamics for the transonic fight.
With appropriate munitions development (Peregrine/CUDA, AARGM-ER, JAGM-F, SPEAR 3) the F-35 will likely make a pretty good weasel airframe it has the ELS and global thermals to do so. It will never be, even with sidekick and LREW/JATM, more than an adequate air to air fighter.
And people who try to sell a long range multisensor interdiction platform as a DCA fighter because that is what their country needs are doing themselves and their nation's defense no honest benefit, whatsoever. The F-35 will remain exceptionally costly to maintain, throughout it's service life. Partially do to the added systems requirements for stealth and partially because hey, it's Lockheed and they have been screwing customers since the F-104 days.
But in terms of aerodynamic performance, what counts is the ability to overcome inertia in rapidly transitioning between maneuver modes across a wide speed band (thrust loading) and altitude regime (wing loading) to be able to rapidly change-state so as to drag the fight to a point on the EM globals where you can achieve dominance over the enemy airframe.
The F-35 doesn't have this and, as far as I can tell, it does not have a lot of the systems it needs (dense kinematic EXCM/MSDM and TADIRCM steerable dazzlers plus multishot missile loads with full 2-way datalinks and MEMS seekers) to be able to compensate for it's innate, kinematic, shortcomings.
I simply don't have the expertise to respond to the claims on kinematics but I am sure there are members on here that do. Have at it folks!