PHOTO: F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter is seen at the Naval Air Station (NAS) Patuxent River, Maryland, January 20, 2012. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
Posted on 07/15/2014 12:38:36 PM PDT by Rodamala
Americans should be worried.
The U.S. military has grounded all its new F-35 Joint Strike Fighters following an incident on June 23, when one of the high-tech warplanes caught fire on the runway of a Florida air base. The no-fly order — which affects at least 50 F-35s at training and test bases in Florida, Arizona, California and Maryland — began on the evening of July 3 and continued through July 11.
To be fair, the Pentagon routinely grounds warplanes on a temporary basis following accidents and malfunctions to buy investigators time to identify problems and to give engineers time to fix them.
But there’s real reason to worry. The June incident might reflect serious design flaws that could render the F-35 unsuitable for combat.
All those F-35s sitting idle could be a preview of a future in which potentially thousands of the Pentagon’s warplanes can’t reliably fly.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.reuters.com ...
PHOTO: F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter is seen at the Naval Air Station (NAS) Patuxent River, Maryland, January 20, 2012. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas
So—The US taxpayer paid how much for this pile of scrap?
They should never have stopped making the F-22 and it is time for another major F-18 upgrade too
In total? I don’t want to know.
For the Aviation and Aerospace Ping List
I guess when you set out to design a “One Size Fits All” aircraft sometimes you get a “One Size Fits Nobody” result.
The F-35 is not an air superiority fighter, it is a strike fighter that was designed to do the ground attack job the F-117 stealth fighter was responsible for but to still have air to air capabilities at parity with the F-16..
Think of the F-35 as an F-117 with much improved low observables, supersonic speed and the air to air capability of the F-16.
It is not an F-22, nor was it ever designed to do the job the F-22 does. It does, however, do many things the F-22 cannot.
Didn’t they find all this out on the engineering test flights - or did they even do any ...???
Never mind the billions spent on this white elephant. Consider what could have been done instead. The opportunity costs are staggering.
A lot of nations (including Turkey, which automatically gives the technology to Iran) invested money and pre-bought these fighters. Italy built an aircraft carrier for them. If they’re not built it will be a black eye for America and a major problem for future procurements. Who will kick in the money next time if we can’t deliver this time? But given its weight and the plainly unbelievable things they say it will be able to do, I feel it will fall short as it may have been oversold, much like the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship.
There are so many things wrong with military procurement I wouldn’t know where to start. But weapons systems are over-sold to gain the political muscle to get them built. So many new missions are added that you end up with something that is neither fish nor fowl and can’t do anything very well. Every mission in the world was added to the LCS, for example. Then there was the Army’s Future Combat Systems which was supposed to be one vehicle (or clusters of common parts) that could do everything from be an ambulance to a personnel carrier to a main battle tank. But it all had to fit on a plane and not weigh more than x tons. When you added together all the requirements they were mutually exclusive. And, to make them fit on the plane they made the sides vertical. That along with no armor meant they could not survive much of a hit. When I enquired I was told they’d solved that problem by assuming we would have total control of the battlefield and nothing would ever hit it.
Then there’s Congress, which only funds these things one year at a time so they are guaranteed lobbyist funds. What a mess.
I know an engineer who worked on it; he told me that there’s a gearbox in the lift fan that turns 15,000 horsepower through a 90° angle. It (the gearbox) has to be very small and light.
Short fat and ugly. The Rosie O’Donnell of warplanes.
A jack of all trades is master of none.
The F-15E is an awesome aircraft... then again so was the F-14.... so is(almost "was") the A-10...
The F-35 is a turd beyond compare... that will surely lose the war with China... but then... that is probably the intent by our military and civilian "leadership" all along.
Wait till they find out, post-invasion, that the ChiCom occupiers don't exactly embrace Faggotry. The will be wishing they had bought a few hundred F15SEs.
If China or Russia were smart THEY SHOULD TAKE US ON NOW BECAUSE UNDER KING OBAMADULLAH THEY'D PROBABLY KICK OUR A**.
Our military is already being down sized.. We're being set-up for ANOTHER invasion other than the one from CENTRAL AMERICA. THAT one is just a DRY RUN for the big one coming soon...
A selfie... lol
We can’t do a damn thing right in this country anymore. In WW2, the P-51 Mustang fighter was designed and into production in less than a year.
You're not going yo believe this, but....
The Pentagon plans to acquire roughly 2,400 of the radar-evading F-35s in coming decades, at a cost of more than $400 billion
What is 400 billion divided by 2400?
It is 166,666,666.66...
Speaking of fences, if they don't work why do we have one around the white house?
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