Official declassifies F35's instantaneous turn rate

[wrightwing]

Yeah, and the routine is toward the end, and they have reserve requirements of not less than 13%

Suffice it to say, it flies a pretty impressive routine, at fairly good weights. It's flown similar manuevers earlier in the routine, as well. That lends pretty good credence to performance without external stores, even at high internal weights, is robust.

[sprstdlyscottsmn]

Most definitely.

[steve2267]

Oh boy.

First, he also says he is at 50 degrees AoA. Subtract that from the 135 degrees and it drops to a transient turn rate of 28+ degrees per second. Nothing to sneeze at. Due to where that maneuver is in the demo we can also assume that is ~50% fuel remaining. We don't know G involved, but from what I have seen even 9G aircraft don't go over ~7G in the routine.

And watch the video, the nose rakes very quickly (~3s) and then seems to stabilize before he goes vertical, this is holding the nose position while AoA decreases, i.e. flight path continues to change.

Which goes to the reason the Jarheads are not disappointed in the performance of the Killer Bee either.

[mixelflick]

Of all I have ever seen, The most Intense instantaneous turn of F-35A is...This, Rhode Island Air Show video by Luke AFB itself.
@0:53~ (short. in a flash.)

(9 months ago, I wanted to see another angle video of this turn, I searched on the Rhode Island Air Show on Youtube,Twitter,Facebook,Instagram,etc and saw so many videos..... After all, I remember that I can't find it and everything was ended in vain....... )

While this is incredibly impressive, the F-22's same maneuver is much crisper, IMO. Do NOT get me wrong - the fact the F-35 has an ITR like this WITHOUT thrust vectoring is impressive. Fantastic piece of engineering. But the Raptor has so much more excess power, plus thrust vectoring = game over.

They done good on the F-35. They done out of this world, for the F-22.

[F-16ADF]

Yep, the F-22 is King Kong. Everybody else is just Curious George.

[gta4]

I used the drag polar of Mig-29A to estimate some order of magnitude, and here are my conclusions:

At peak ITR, the ITR dissipates at about 5deg/sec^2. So if the average turn rate in a 3 second interval is 28+deg/sec, it is safe to assume the peak ITR is more than 33deg/sec. Still very impressive though.

[botsing]

It would be nice if you could remove the "Official declassifies" part of this topic's name.

[spazsinbad]

It would be nice if the meditators merged this thread with the thread I've indicated earlier BECUZ "what has this topic got to do with 'F-35 versus XYZ'?" Answers are on the back of any cereal packet.

[gta4]

It would be nice if you could remove the "Official declassifies" part of this topic's name.

Yes hope the moderator could do it now

[mixelflick]

Took them a long time to showcase these wares...

I almost think they deliberately held off to give Pierre Sprey/APA just enough rope. Then when the time was right, they sprang this and they hanged themselves. It's a rather remarkable piece of engineering, as it does everything really well and some things it's a world beater in.

It's air to air prowess was always in question. To some, it still is. But demos like this, what we know about its SA/EW capabilities and results from Red Flag don't lie: It's more than capable of holding its own both BVR and WVR. The damn problem is, the F-15 has set such a high bar: 104-0.

How do you Trump that?

[ricnunes]

I almost think they deliberately held off to give Pierre Sprey/APA just enough rope. Then when the time was right, they sprang this and they hanged themselves. It's a rather remarkable piece of engineering, as it does everything really well and some things it's a world beater in.

It's a nice theory indeed

However I don't believe that to be the case.
IMO, I think that due to a combination of LM concentrating mostly on the engineering part of the JSF/F-35 program together with the perceived fact that the JSF/F-35 program didn't have and wouldn't have any competition and as such a "sure thing", lead LM to mostly forget or give a very minor importance to all the PR (Public Relations) surrounding the JSF/F-35 program.

Unfortunately (IMO), PR is extremely important to any fighter aircraft program, specially nowadays and this (lack of PR regarding the JSF/F-35 program) resulted in an increasingly number of US politicians (such as Senator McCain) demanding the canceling of the JSF/F-35 program or at least a huge review of the program (which indeed happened in 2010) and even with a JSF partner nation - Canada - threatening to pull out from the program while other partner nations had indeed second thoughts about the program (Italy, for example).

As such I don't think this was a deliberate move from LM. It was only bad PR from LM! Basically the opposite of Saab from where we saw "excellent PR" but the engineering part, well, Bah...

Bottom line, LM completely failed in terms of PR and as such they are now together with the USAF solving this issue, resorting to Airshow demonstrations which like it or not are an excellent PR tool.

[magitsu]

I'm not sure about that. Just yesterday I read how YF-23 test pilot, who had later flown also F-22 admit that they lost due to LM having a better handle on PR. With them losing due to the narrow minded engineer approach. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/2 ... yf-23-lost

I think it's inevitable due to the scope of the JSF program. It was always going to be the main target to try to steal money away from. Whenever it got into trouble, like before the realignment pre-Bogdan takeover, it was going to be too big for any PR to smooth things over. It's like opposition politics vs. government. The latter gets the attention and opposition popularity grows not based on their own actions, rather the government messing things up. You can see Gripen "NG" serving as tabula rasa (blank slate) for many critics. Not because of its own merits, but rather perceived frustrations towards the incumbent.

[marsavian]

Took them a long time to showcase these wares...

I almost think they deliberately held off to give Pierre Sprey/APA just enough rope. Then when the time was right, they sprang this and they hanged themselves. It's a rather remarkable piece of engineering, as it does everything really well and some things it's a world beater in.

It's air to air prowess was always in question. To some, it still is. But demos like this, what we know about its SA/EW capabilities and results from Red Flag don't lie: It's more than capable of holding its own both BVR and WVR. The damn problem is, the F-15 has set such a high bar: 104-0.

How do you Trump that?

It took them such a long time because the FCS was not actually ready, remember the 2015 F-16 AoA test and also the excess buffeting ? The point is LMT always knew what the potential was in ACM because they had designed the plane to do that but they just had to sort out the FCS to enable it in all flight conditions and scenarios. The point is it's a software change that was easily retrofitted to earlier F-35 so no harm no foul.

[steve2267]

It took them such a long time because the FCS was not actually ready, remember the 2015 F-16 AoA test and also the excess buffeting ? The point is LMT always knew what the potential was in ACM because they had designed the plane to do that but they just had to sort out the FCS to enable it in all flight conditions and scenarios. The point is it's a software change that was easily retrofitted to earlier F-35 so no harm no foul.

The 2015 F-35 AoA ("vs F-16") test is a beautiful example of why you test.

[sferrin]

I'm not sure about that. Just yesterday I read how YF-23 test pilot, who had later flown also F-22 admit that they lost due to LM having a better handle on PR. With them losing due to the narrow minded engineer approach. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/2 ... yf-23-lost

That was nearly 30 years ago. Back when Sony was the be all and end all of consumer electronics. Things change.