Posted on 02/27/2012 4:54:12 PM PST by raptor22
Defense: Pilots who arrived a year ago to train on the fighter of the future are still waiting as safety concerns, cost overruns and questions about the whole program's feasibility mount.
The F-35 is meant to be America's next-generation fighter, the heir to the Air Force's F-15 Eagle and the Navy's and Marines' F/A-18 Hornet. Those two aircraft have fulfilled their air superiority and ground-attack roles well, yet many are well beyond their expected life expectancy.
The F-35 would fill America's defense needs in an age of budget constraints, we were told. So far it has not been a smooth takeoff.
About 35 of the best fighter pilots from the Air Force, Marines and Navy who arrived in the Florida Panhandle last year to learn to fly the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter are still waiting. They've been limited to occasionally taxying them and firing up the engines.
Otherwise, their training is limited to three F-35 flight simulators, classroom work and flights in older-model jets. Only a handful of pilots get to fly the F-35s.
Concerns have arisen, ranging from improperly installed parachutes under the pilots' ejector seats to whether the aircraft have been adequately tested.
Production has been slow and delayed, and the cost has risen from $233 billion to $385 billion. Only 43 F-35s have been built, and an additional 2,443 have been ordered by the Pentagon.
Part of the problem is that the F-35 is a one-size-fits-all aircraft designed to fit roles from taking off a carrier's deck to hovering and landing in a confined space on a foreign battlefield. It's meant to be a ground-attack and air-superiority fighter. The question is whether it can adequately be both.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
I don’t know of any new aircraft rollout that hasn’t been plagued by problems. Somehow we manage to get them in the air.
When they cancelled the F22, they touted the F35 up the ying yang. At the time I said the F35 would be cancelled in time too. A lot of folks told me I was crazy.
Well, how crazy am I looking these days.
We should never have listened on the F22. It should still be in production today.
If there is a car equivalent, I’d say it’s more like the Edsel.
Nice, shiny, and complicated.
Exactly right. We never seem to learn that there are people out there that will ALWAYS find trouble with EVERY piece of military equipment.
IMHO, "next generation" should have been an X-29 style drone. The plane could cost 1/10 as much (when one considers the total logistical cost of piloted aircraft, including training, medical care, retirement, S&R infrastructure) and could pull Gs that would kill an F-35 pilot. Lighter, faster, more maneuverable and more easily mass produced.
You got that right. The F-22 is the finest air superiority fighter in the world. There arem’t enough of them unfortunately.
Defense ping
Agreed, even if you could somehow null out inertia
the future of military aviation is unmanned.
Nice to see you, by the way.
The F-22 should never have been cancelled, but I believe the F-35 will eventually turn out well, though more expensive than it should be.
I keep in mind the Abrams tank. Remember how absolutely vilified that tank was when it was being developed and built in the Seventies? The libs were squalling long, hard and loud...the engine would never work right, the gun was too small, it was too complicated, it would never work in a sandy environment, etc.
Best battle tested tank in the world. But we won’t hear a peep from a single detractor. As if it all went down the memory hole. Kind of like global cooling back in the Seventies.
If all this stuff weren’t so damned serious, it would be hilarious. I do think we will rue the day we cancelled the F-22 program.
Agreed, even if you could somehow null out inertia
the future of military aviation is unmanned.
Nice to see you, by the way.
Absolutely right, on both counts.
A # 1
Too few
It was never meant, nor designed to be both. Whether idiots in the DOD, the vendor or the politicians began to build it up as an air superiority option (knowing it wasn't) after the writing on the wall for the F-22 became apparent is a valid question.
Short answer, hell no.
I agree with each of your thoughts here. That omage to the global cooling is one that reminds folks that the Leftists tried to scare the crap out of us back in the 70s, because the planet was cooling.
Then they got smart (as if you could call it that) by claiming the earth was warming, so they could hit everything in sight negatively, because it was adding to global warming.
I remember those days well, because they were also demanding folks in the U. S. to stop having so many children, because the earth couldn’t sustain them.
At the time, being a young kid full of mush, I didn’t realize what a pantload that was, so my wife and I decided to limit our family to two kids. Today I would have more like six to eight.
It as all about reducing northern European ancestry influence on the United States. It worked as least in part.
Thats true,, aircraft rollouts have traditionally had bugs. But that was when we built planes from drawings with timeframes ranging from 6 months to 2 years.
The F-35 has been in one sort of development or another for almost 20 years.
The thing is a moonpig, that cannot outrun an F-16 or F-15.
It carries smaller loads, shorter distances. It carries fewer weapons. It is FAR slower than offerings from Europe and Russia. It’s supposedly better than average in stealth and computers,, but any advantages there gave us a few years at best. The rest of the world is living and breathing electronics and programming.
This thing is a monument to political procurement and it’s hard to believe this is the best our country can roll out.
It was always a weak sister,,,justified by the F-22s existence. Of course,, we are left with this as the main event.
Carriers with nothing but these (assuming they ever make the stealth tailhook work) are going to have less power projection than our carriers have ever fielded in the modern era.
Im waiting for the “D” model,,hoping they put a bubble canopy on it. They say that improvement worked well on Mustangs and Spitfires.
How soon we forget the long, troubled, and cost-overrun plagued developement of the F-22.
ping
There were a lot of people who thought the F35 was a turkey. Including this guy.
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