Posted on 09/04/2014 8:17:53 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Fighter jets, like the Lockheed F-35, are becoming increasingly expensive. Is it possible to make something much cheaper? Angus Batey reports on a new breed of plane poised to take to the skies.
At this summer's Farnborough Air Show in England, the talk was dominated by the mishaps of one plane: the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II, also known as the Joint Strike Fighter. Due to be adopted by major air forces in the decades to come, it was supposed to be the star of the show. But in the end, the $100m-a-unit jet failed to turn up to its coming-out party after an engine fire in one of the production models grounded the fleet.
But another new jet fighter, which had taken less than two years to design, build and fly, did make it to Farnborough. The Textron Scorpion costs $20m, still not exactly a bargain by most people's standards, but a fifth of the cost of the F-35. It suggests that not every advanced defence project has to necessarily come in years late and billions over budget – and points to a new twist in not only the future of fighter-jet design, but also in more humanitarian roles that a budget jet could carry out.
As Textron AirLand president Bill Anderson has said, the majority of work devoted to designing and developing fighters over the last several decades has focused on creating expensive, sophisticated machines. Whether it's Lockheed’s F-35 and F-22 Raptor, the Eurofighter Typhoon or the Boeing F/A-18, the designs have reflected the desire for advanced performance over affordability. Yet in today's economic environment, cost is becoming an unavoidably compelling issue for even the richest western nations.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Led me on like a bass!
and if they decided to buy half as many F-35’s.... the total price would not change... no savings
The criteria was keeping it all inside your lips. I passed. No mess. ;)
I wondered if the guy at AFSC that gave us nomex gloves ever thought of that other application when he designed them. I think not or they would have put a clean-out drain on the middle finger.
No guns in the picture. The Scorpion is basically a frame. You can attaché anything you want on it. But in reality it is not a dog fighter.
Regardless buy lots of them. My company is a vendor for Textron.
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http://defense-update.com/products/n/netfires.htm
Canceled program, but it was based on autonomous UAVs - they just called them cruise missiles....:^)
The "man in the loop" was optional.
Yes, but one good explosive device could knock them all out and off course. Then one still has several more of those “bombs” for the rest of your little sortie.
There is always something impractical about advancing technology. Something that cannot be accounted for.
One thing that history has taught me, is never be too pessimistic (100 years ago “it’ll never happen”), or optimistic (now, “we can run anything on a wind turbine and it will cost nothing!”). Things never really change. They are only tweaked.
I was thinking guns are needed for ground support in the light attack role.
But technologies are also a bluff: if we can present the picture of omnipotence thanks to advances, we discourage potential adversaries. Makes 'em have to come up with their technologies to try to overcome our putative advantages - and makes them push their aggressions out to the future.
One example of many was the army "Assault Breaker" munitions of the '70s: thousands of artillery and missile launched smart bomblets that were designed to attack the swarms of Soviet tanks through their thinly-armored turret tops. No one knows if it would have really stopped the 20,000 tanks of the Warsaw Pact but it gave them pause and that's what we really needed.
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