Posted on 04/09/2019 8:13:31 PM PDT by BenLurkin
“There is no price too high in this world for China and Russia to pay to get Japan's missing F-35, if they can. Big deal,” tweeted Tom Moore, a former senior professional staff member at the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Both Russia and China maintain a significant naval presence in the region, sparking concerns that they could find the missing F-35, Business Insider reports.
“If one of Japan’s F-35s is sitting at the bottom of the Pacific, we are probably about to see one of the biggest underwater espionage and counter-espionage ops since the Cold War. If it was operating without its radar reflectors pinpointing where it went in may be an issue,” tweeted Tyler Rogoway, editor of The War Zone.
While the expert thinks that it would be difficult to reverse engineer the aircraft from pieces of wreckage recovered from the seabed, he warns that the debris could still offer vital information. “There are still lots of interesting parts that could be studied to get some interesting details: a particular onboard sensor or something that can't be seen from the outside but could be gathered by putting your hands on chunks of the aircraft intakes or exhaust section, on the radar reflectors etc,” he said
The stealth fighter, which has been beset by cost overruns and delays, has a price tag of around $100 million each.
Japan plans to buy 147 U.S.-made F-35s, most of them F-35As, over the next decade.
The U.S. military temporarily grounded its entire fleet of F-35s last year after one of the jets crashed during a training mission in South Carolina.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I assume the jet is confirmed to have crashed in the water? Or is that hopeful speculation?
Time to bring the “Glomar Explorer” out of mothballs and have her looking for “manganese nodule deposits” again.
Oops, now she is in China! How could that have happened??
“The World Ship Society’s November 2015 magazine stated that the ship arrived at the Chinese ship breakers at Zhoushan on 5 June 2015.[20]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer
Hopefully they initiated the auto-destruct sequence before he got the thing all 625 miles to North Korea and back on the ground.
We know exactly where it is.
“Blind Man’s Bluff” is a GREAT book about the CIA op to recover a whole Soviet sub —with nukes— intact and whole.
Verrrry readable, a real page-turner.
Not ALL of The Hunt For Red October was fiction.
Did it crash?
See my #3—I remember at the time the State of Hawaii was hopping mad because they were convinced Howard Hughes was going to steal all of Hawaii’s “manganese nodules.” It was all made up as a cover for the op, and Hawaii fell for it, hook line and sinker.
Is it really too hard to ask if the creator of the jet did not include a homing devise to locate it? We have Lojack for cars and other devices, including computers, and cell phones. It is hard to believe they cannot locate a “lost” jet.
And true?
We know exactly where it is.
They’ve sent 007 to get it back.
And true?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer
These claims are inconsistent with attempts to sell them to Turkey, which would all but certainly take whatever Russian/Chinese cash it could get for the samples.
Has anyone considered that pilot defected..could be a big payout for him
An update (only 3 hours old)(lots of ads, sorry):
Some debris found.
bttt
Yes, great book. I am reading one now called “Red November” and it is quite interesting.
I vaguely recall reading somewhere that the scene in the book about the collision with a Russian sub, was...inspired...by real events.
IMHO, the chicoms probably have had the entire package of design and operational details for a long time...
That was a great book. I read it when it came out and I was working in the optical communications industry. Fascinating information on how undersea cables were tapped in the cold war in impossible conditions — without the cable operators even knowing they were being tapped.
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