[Not only does the engine have to tilt down 90 degrees]
Well, all other things aside, this is patently untrue.
It is the ducting that rotates down.
* These countries include the likes of Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Panama, Grenada, Bosnia, Libya, and countries similar to those, which match the countries the US has been involved against over the last several decades. These are countries that would not be able to provide a cogent defense against a concerted Western attack, with only Iraq, Bosnia and Libya in that list being the best able to provide some sort of action. Of those the strongest was Iraq, but even for it its integrated air defense system, called KARI, was a primarily Soviet-French sourced system that was oriented towards a limited threat from 80s-style Iran and/or Israel and not the USAF.
** Obviously if the F-35 is utilized in a campaign against a near-peer adversary like China or Russia the results may be different than when used towards the likes of Libya or Afghanistan, but the likelihood of a hot shooting-war against near-peer adversaries is very low. For the matter, even a shooting war against the likes of Pakistan, Iran and North Korea appears to be a hard ask, let alone thoughts of ingress against the Chinese IADS around Shanghai and Beijing. While not impossible, I just don't see it happening. What if it were to happen? Well, even then the F-35 would do good for itself. Why? Because it is never about one plane vs one plane. It would be a wholly stacked array of assets and options, starting with massed cruise missile attacks and electronic attack, and the likelihood of a plane-to-plane encounter that would lead to a USN F-35 flying off against a Chinese Sukhoi-knockoff is nil.
Just a note:
Israel has agreed to buy a total of 33 each F-35s, taking first deliveries in 2016. Average cost is said to be $110 million each.
The VSTOL to me seems to be a very expensive add-on that forces the plane to carry around an awful lot of weight after take off......for the CAS role, it would seem to me first to get damaged by ground fire.
The “Stealth” thing has always amazed me. Whether by shape or cross-section by aspect angle or absorbing material, no platform is invisible to RF over an extended RF range....take your pick, 1 GHZ all the way up to 18 GHz & above. Russians never throw any of their radars away really. The Chinese too, in a lot of respects. They’ve even got UHF radars, and lower frequency OTH radar systems for that really long detection range.
The best you can do is design your “stealth” for a specific band and aspect angle and plan your strikes accordingly.
To me, this plane makes no sense from a 3-role perspective. It is very expensive also. If I had my druthers, I’d be making more A-10s and updating some other planes like F-16s and F/A 18s.
The real issues are exploding costs per airframe, weight on the B reducing the STOVL bomb load, and guns on the B and C model. While the author brings some of these up, he uses errant "facts" to make his case.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned in its favor is that not the A and C model have done quite well in their ship suitability testing. C model carrier testing was delayed due to needed tail hook redesign. When they took it to the boat with the new hook it did so well that they accelerated the testing. Planned for only day landings, the test pilots requested to go straight into night landings.
The issues with the B model aren't so much with the aircraft, but rather STOVL in general. The shipboard mishap rate for Harriers is so high, that it should not be tolerated in this era. Speaking with friends in both the USMC and UK Harrier communities, that plane is on the ragged edge of performance, without enough wiggle room for error. Hopefully, the F-35 will be safer.
I'm not ready to write the F-35 off as a failure in the air to air role just yet.
The one report claiming the F-35 lost so badly to the F-16 seemed misleading when I read more about it.
I'm not sure where they were in their flight test program, but I have it on good authority they don't hire John McCains as test pilots these days and, given the costs involved, generally flight tests are designed to test and gather data about something specific and not break anything.
While the company has many reasons to sugar coat everything and downplay anything sour, it sounded like that was a test to explore/verify maneuverability at the currently approved limits at that time using the F-16.
I admit that's almost as sugary as Southern sweet tea, but if it's accurate, then the full performance and flight limitations of the F-35 still remain unexplored and unknown.
Unknown as far as we, the great unwashed, propagandized public, know...and, as a general rule, I hope it stays that way until we show it off for real.
The F117 shoot down was pure negligence on the part of NATO and NATO mission planners.
USAF was prevented from using the aircraft as intended and confined to very strict ingress/egress routes into the AOR because the Operation was a NATO effort, not a US effort.
In addition, no efforts were made to remove or apprehend the known “observers” sitting outside the base observing and reporting takeoff times of the F117’s.
IOW, the F117 was “set-up” to be shot down.