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Posted on 04/30/2012 5:15:58 AM PDT by Kaslin
This plane may well have outlived the technological cycle where it may have made sense.
What is there for a replacement for F-35 if it is dropped?
the FA-18 should have a long life ahead of it. I think the F-16 is still being produced. What was the F-35’s competitor? Of course folks will say: “why produce it, it lost the competition.”
And it is past time to restart the F-22 production line, although it is an air superority fighter, we’ll need more of them.
As a pianist, I’m bound to say this is rather an insult to my instrument.
How disappointing—I thought I was going to read about actual pianos that fly while you play them. Now THAT would be worth the expense.
Each service would get a core model enhanced with elements specific to their needs ~ Army would have fore and aft mounted artillery pieces, the Navy would need two engines ~ one for "on board" tasks and the other to be used as a plug-in module to supplement the main steam system on ships of the line.
The Marines, though, would have both a fore an aft engine, with 1 artillery piece, a full-time "live aboard' company with bayonets at the ready lining the flatcars ~ and would burn wood ~ a proven and reliable energy source.
Army and Navy would, of course, take the big jump into the more risky coal fired variants.
And do not sell the Raptor to ANYBODY other than US forces.
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/ww1/images/08.jpg ~ almost forgot, the Kaiser’s High Command actually moved ahead with these concepts ~
A good article. I’ve long had the feeling that the F-35 was a basically good initial design that has been compromised by being asked to do too many things. No single design can do everything, and efforts to break that rule usually end up with a mediocre plane that does nothing particularly well, and/or a project that ends up costing far, far more than it was ever supposed to.
It's all going to aerospace union members.
Why not have bought a lot more of them and a lot of F-16s, A-10s and F-18s for ground pounding?
Five minutes of analysis would have been enough to determine that this program was going to be a disaster.
A plane can’t be STOVL and Long Range and Stealth and Supersonic and High Payload and Agile and Fight.
If you need STOVL, you trade off speed, range, payload and agility, because the vertical thrust components are going to be too much to carry on a on a fast agile fighter. The needs of supersonic travel and STOVL are simply incompatible.
F-111, they never learn.
Why not have bought a lot more of them and a lot of F-16s, A-10s and F-18s for ground pounding?
I too have asked that question a number of times. The problem as I see it is that all of the services try to make their equipment multi-role do everything items. What they end up with nearly everytime is a something that doesn’t do any of them in an outstanding manner.
The Air Force does it with their Aircraft all of the time. The Navy does it with their ships.
Why? Well I certainly don’t know why but I suspect it is a matter of dollars available for a project and once a project does make it through the approval process everyone piles on and adds their own “special” requirements and you end up with an Elephant which all who are familiar with the process know was originally designed as a mouse.
That's what I was thinking. More F-22s for escort and air superiority. Then you can bring in new-build F-18s and F-16s to put ordnance on target.
Yes, I get that a multi-role can, by definition, do it all. That they don't need a huge strike package etc. However, as others have pointed out they will never be the absolute best at any one mission. There is always some form of compromise. Why not send in the absolute best air-to-air system? Don't just control the airspace over the target, dominate it. Why send in something that has merely ok payload and range? Why not send in something carrying enough ordnance to get the job done in one trip, no questions asked.
A real danger is that some country that has enough industrial base to make cheap cars will start mass producing thousands of cheap UAVs, with the idea of an air armada overpowering their enemies’ small handful of ultra high tech aircraft.
A high tech fighter can engage six enemy simultaneously, but then it is out of weapons. What happens when it faces six hundred enemy? By the time it can land and rearm, the drones have destroyed its airbase.
The best use for such expendable UAVs would be as “buzz bombs”, with primitive guidance to make them relatively invulnerable to ECM. Just a 1,000lb bomb with an engine, fuel tank, crude “fly by wire” guidance and a simple low tech computer brain to tell it to make any course corrections. If the brain is fried, no problem, it just continues on its hard programmed course, with a little loss of accuracy of its 1,000lb bomb.
Others could carry a short range air-to-air missile, to throw a barrage at the enemy high tech aircraft. Out of a dozen such missiles thrown at you at once, somebody is bound to get lucky.
Ah, the last time we had a technological goat rope was under McNamara (the “genius” behind the Edsel and the World Bank).
His product?
The F-111...a do all for the USAF and Navy.
The Navy rightly rejected it and the USAF put up with it as a bomber (sort of) for many years.
It wasn’t really a bad plane...but it was trying to be an “everything”...with predictable results.
Why? Well I certainly don’t know why ...
Because Congress ends up saying "you can have only X number ships or planes." The services end up saying "If we can only have X, we need it to do A, B, C, and D."
If they could have four times as many ships or planes, then they can have one to do A, another to do B, etc.
You do have a point there. When you think about it does make sense especially in a peace time era. In War though that sort of thing gets ignored and purpose built becomes the norm rather than a do-it-all platform.
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