I can’t believe Lockheed doesn’t just pull the plug on it.
One of the biggest problems was the Marine Corps variant with the demand to have VTOL capabilities, which was a huge engineering problem.
Pilots love it.
Just be glad the managers at Boeing did not win - they don’t even know how to design a commercial airplane.
I think it (all variants) is terribly short-ranged but by all accounts is a game-changer.
The amount of time and effort to bring ANYTHING new to the military has become ridiculous unfortunately is going to lead to only a handful of companies capable or willing to bother. Yes even fewer than now.
People in the biz, commenting on defense-related forums, really, really like the F-35.
http://elementsofpower.blogspot.com/2015/09/dave-majumdars-f-35-punk-journalismagain.html
[ Today, Dave Majumdar, once a promising aero reporter, apparently needed some rent money. Why else would he fabricate another F-35 click-bait hit piece for the lower-brow crowd, (update: the Punk is now the ‘Defense Editior’ of the digital rag) rehashing the pap that David Axe used to set off a disinformation cascade? Now I could spend all night Fisking Majumdar’s craptastic article to include “27 8x10 color glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence” but there’s only a couple of things worth my time, nailing Dave to the wall, that should cast the rest of his ‘pap’ under the proper spotlight. The first is his apparent (willful?) inability to discern information from ‘spin’:]
http://www.worldaffairsboard.com/showthread.php?t=59927&page=39
[The F-35 is certainly valuable, but Russian agents looking up the F-35’s skirt isn’t necessarily a terrible strategic threat. Russian industry just isn’t capable of building anything comparable whether they have the hardware specs or not. Additionally much of the F-35’s capability is software driven and not even allied operators have access to the core code.
This is a trend that actually started with the F-22, where the situational awareness and computational power is more valuable than the physical hardware of the jet. F-22 pilots have repeatedly said that the F-22’s speed, maneuverability, acceleration, and even stealth are some of the least impressive aspects of the jet. The F-35 takes the informational and networking dominance even further and that kind of capability isn’t readily replicated by examining the jet itself.]
The icing on the cake is the fact that the Israelis are said to have flown to Tehran and back. Would the Iranians have liked to have shot one of them down? Sure. Better luck next time:
Note that due to fuel constraints, the Israelis might have flown in a straight line. Tehran is 400 miles from the Iraqi border. That’s a lot of Iranian airspace to fly through without SAM radars lighting up and sending missiles up at those planes.
The Israelis can order any American fighter they want that’s not the F-22. They went head-over-heels for the F-35:
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/iranian-commander-kept-secret-israeli-f-35-stealth-fighters-had-violated-iran-airspace
[Israel is the first country outside the U.S. to acquire the F-35 fifth-generation fighter, of which it could take up to 75.
Noteworthy Israeli F-35 deals have been severely criticized because the aircraft are more expensive than those purchased by the U.S. Air Force (USAF) since they feature several unique (and indigenous) systems to satisfy Israeli Air Force (IAF) operational requirements.
However former Minister of Defense Avigdor Lieberman explained that “The F-35 squadrons are the pinnacle of technology, and will assist the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and air force in meeting the many security challenges Israel faces head-on. They are a central aspect in protecting the safety of the people of Israel along the country’s borders and even away from them.”
The U.S. in fact has given Israel more military aid than any other country in the world – currently around $4bn a year – and its laws on arms sales require that Israel always maintains military superiority in the Middle East.
Israel has praised the Lockheed Martin F-35 as a “game-changer”. ]
Another Boeing PR placement? They should be more concerned with their own malpractice on the “737” MAX.
People are surprised when the government tries to design a horse by committee.
Where is Billy Mitchell when we need him?
I am now getting old and in my lifetime there has not been a single weapon system that has not been trashed by the “experts” in the Press and even within the industry.
I thought of the F-111 from the start. The kitchen sink approach rarely succeeds.
The F 22 has been a better plane all along but not sexy enough for the brass. When the plug was pulled on it, many of us knew immediately it would be a disaster waiting to happen.
I knew this was a bad idea from the get go. The F22 is a much better A/V overall. The F35 has jump jet capabilities, but that limits your payload.. You need two engines to keep up with the new technologies with speed.. The F22 is twice as fast and has super cruise, plus double payload...
Reminds me of the multi-function printers I’ve seen / had...can do lots of things but not very good at anything.
Sack the people in the Pentagon who pushed these crappy programs and get back to weapons systems that really work.
The point is that it has been decades to get to where the F-35 is now. No airplane should take decades to design.
No one aircraft can do it all. This battle went on before with the F-111 and we ended up with the F-14, F-15, F-16 and A-10
Many military people wrote this thing off way back when it was first being developed just because it was to be that jack-of-all-trades. Meanwhile the Israelis keep reinventing the F-15 as the superior aircraft. An excellent purpose built A/C turns out to be modifiable in many directions to do whatever is needed.
I do think, though, that the F-22 buy should have been doubled.
How surprising that one of the companies behind the LCS, the one size fits all ship for the Navy that doesn’t; would also be behind the one size fits all plane that doesn’t, for every military branch.