Posted on 01/08/2017 3:25:48 PM PST by huldah1776
WASHINGTON — According to some reports, America's fifth-generation stealth aircraft doesn't excel at dogfighting.
But fortunately, the F-35 Lightning II is not built for dogfighting.
While some analysts have argued that the air-to-air-combat capabilities of the F-35A won't match some of its peer aircraft, pilots who spoke to Business Insider pointed out that the US's fifth-generation fighter is designed in such a way that dogfighting may be an afterthought.
"If you were to engage an F-35 in say, a visual dogfight capability," US Air Force Brig. Gen. Scott Pleus began, "the capabilities of the F-35 are absolutely eye-watering compared to a fourth-generation fighter."
"The airplane has unbelievable maneuvering characteristics that make it completely undefeatable in an air-to-air environment," said Pleus, who has 153 flight hours in the F-35A and is the director of the F-35 integration office.
"So if it's a long-range contact, you'll never see me and you'll die, and if it's within visual-range contact you'll see me and you're gonna die and you're gonna die very quickly."
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Very expensive toast!
Awesome.
I like the A-10 as well. The f-35 is just a piece of crap wrapped in dollar bills. At least the F-22 did something useful.
lol. I think they need a new test pilot.
Lockheed officials have separately downplayed reports that the same F-35, flown by the same pilot, previously lost mock dogfights with the Goodyear Blimp and a beagle on a flying doghouse.
So what do we do when a stealth drone sneaks up behind it and it’s incapable of dog fighting?
They never learn. Every time they try to create an all purpose aircraft they end up with a horrifically expensive fiasco. The only good multi-purpose aircraft they ever came up with started with single purpose naval fighters which were strong enough to handle everything they could strap on to them (e.g. the F4U and the F4 Phantom).
LOL. Sometimes satire is dead on.
As someone posted, the F-35 is the 21st century answer to the F-111.
I wouldn’t want to dogfight a drone. It can pull more g’s than a manned aircraft and would be much smaller and harder to see.
Late to the show but the F-4 was the biggest smoker on the planet.
It was a flying brick that my Red Flag spotted long before arrival.
ZSU-23-4 operations.
I would actually like to fly that plane.
Wonder what it’s STOL factor is?
On board. One interesting development of network warfare, they recently tested the F35 with a navy launched SM6. The fighter provided the sensors the navy navy lofted the missile up and the fighter guided it to intercept. That means Aegis ships in range represent magazine stores of 60+ missiles each... Question is, who gets credit for the kill?
Which one? The F-35 or the Fokker Dr.1?
That goes back to the founding of the air force. The army should have been allowed to keep the close air support craft. The air force doesn’t like the A-10 because it isn’t sexy enough, it just does the job.
And Block F has a hidden in-wing gun. A little trap door at the front of the wing pops open to fire the gun, then closes. It's projected to fly in 2019 (subject to slippage, of course).
Minor losses? We lost 63 B-17s on raids against ball-bearing plants at Schweinfurt in October 1943. Over 600 crew members killed or captured in a single bloody day. Even at maximum wartime production, we couldn’t sustain those losses and only the introduction of the P-51 allowed us to resume bombing raids deep into Germany on a regular basis.
And Schweinfurt wasn’t the only “bad day” for 8th Air Force over Germany.
I was in Naval Aviation during this time. As I recall the AF totally would not buy another NavAir design. Pure politics; it's still going on, as far as I can tell.
“You had to pay attention going into a new place, because the Mohawk has full reverse pitch on the prop you could land at airstrips where you would have a hell of a time taking off. When you come in at about 80 knots just hanging in the engines and the props, you can stop in 600 or 700 feet easily but you can’t take off in that distance.”
Now, now, you’re bringing reality in to compare it with what the salesmen and bombing advocates promised prior to the employment of the weapons system in actual combat.
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