LockMart's New F-35 (Now with more electrolytes!)
Posted on 07/03/2013 2:05:52 PM PDT by Blood of Tyrants
The Pentagon's pursuit of the Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighter jet has been a heartbreaking one. If you're a tax payer, the program's estimated $1 trillion price tag probably breaks your heart a little bit. If you're an aviation enthusiast, the constant whittling away of the do-it-all aircraft's features, which in many cases actually amounts to adding weight and taking away maneuverability, must hurt a little bit, too.
If you're just an everyday American, though, you should be downright shattered that after a decade and a fortune spent, the F-35 will actually be more vulnerable than the aircraft it's replacing. At this point, the Pentagon is literally rewriting its rulebook so that the dumbed-down super jet will pass muster.
The Defense Department's annual weapons testing report reveals that the military actually adjusted the performance specifications for the consistently-underperforming line of F-35 fighter jets. In other words, they couldn't get the jets to do what they were supposed to do, so they just changed what they were supposed to do.
(Excerpt) Read more at motherboard.vice.com ...
Exactly...I’ve wondered why from the beginning they were trying this stunt again. The F-111 ended up being a fine aircraft, but the notion that one airframe could satisfy the requirements of multiple branches of the military was provided nigh impossible. I’m afraid this time they don’t have the good sense to reverse course and recoup something usable out of it.
f14 with carbon fiber body would be ffffaaassssttt
Silly goose! You actually think that the stuff the military buys has anything to do with being the best it can get? Lockheed Martin, in particular, has been selling the US government overpriced junk for years. All these companies have been shrewd in putting facilities in small towns in every state. That means Congress is all for spending as much money as possible, regardless of what the military gets in return.
It’s a big racket. Retired colonels and generals become lobbyists for these companies, and it’s a wholesale looting of the treasury. Just like the welfare and food stamp racket, which is about big agriculture businesses, military procurement is all about enriching defenses companies and Congress.
The F-35 is like the F-111, where bureaucrats decreed that “one size fits all, and jack of all trades”. It doesn’t do any one thing real well. Add to that the decision to make it a single engine aircraft, rather than twin engine, simply to save money, results in less than optimum performance and survivability.
Requirements “creep” by the DoD has killed many viable and initially, on target programs. This one is no different. They want new widgets and gizmos in the airframe, well, there’s a trade off. It gets heavier, thus slower. Then the subsequent trade off, performance.
Yet, the contractor is always the punching bag for doing what the “customer” asks and pays for.
No win situation.
When programs like the U2, SR and F117 were in production, they were either under or on budget because there weren’t thousands of acquisition people running around putting their “mark” on the airframe.
“The F-111 ended up being a fine aircraft..”
It did. Unfortunately, for the Australian Air Force, not ours.
LockMart's New F-35 (Now with more electrolytes!)
I have a feeling it doesn't - either. Defense R&D capabilities (at least on the public stuff) seems to have hit a wall back in the Clinton years.
F-35 doesn’t have canards.
How would anyone know? Why would anyone who did know post such information here?
Rule of thumb in such matters. Those who know, don’t talk. Those who talk, don’t know.
Until it burned.
Carbon burns. Aluminium melts. Reality is complex and hard.
It only took 120 days from start to flight for the Mustang.
The RAH-66 Comanche was an example of what happens when there is this so-called “requirements creep.” We worked on stuff for it at the company I retired from and all of a sudden, one day it was cancelled. 22 years later and who knows how many billions.
We were also doing work on F-22 parts - lost that - and the Boeing offering for the new stealth fighter, which lost to competitor Lockheed. It was a butt-ugly plane, I don’t know that it would have turned out any better.
I think that virtually every new aircraft made in the last 50 years has been harshly criticized during “growing pains”. I do worry that this particular plane was designed to “do everything fairly well”, which may just not be physically possible. This might matter against an adversary that can do one thing well - and cost 1/10th as much.
All Lockheed, Kelly Johnson, Ben Rich, and Black Programs. Their 13 step process run internally to do it right.
We need old fashioned fighter fly-offs with these proto's done in the black and keep all the Milacrats out of it and K-Street Vultures too.
Let real fighter pilots fly the protos and see what the hell they can do, all these flight test programs are so anal so risk adverse it is enough to make your head explode...
Oh you mean Monica
Yes that was the nickname it earned after Lewinsky with it's big air inlet in front...
Kelly Johnson isn’t around anymore.
Oh it does. I knew someone who drove one.
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Problem is, you can't 'paint stealth' onto an airframe. The airframe itself has to be stealthy. That's in the basic design of it.
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