Haven’t there been quite a few F-16 crashes, compared to F-15?
Having one engine on a warplane does seem like a basic problem. If the plane is worth $100 million, that means that every turbine blade, every bearing, every SPOF in the engine carries the value of the entire plane plus the life pilot, at least if its flying over water.
F-35 engine is very high performance, very advanced engine operating at the outer bounds of what a gas turbine is capable of. They’re pushing a lot of things to the limit in that engine. There’s simply no getting around that.
When you add to that the problem that if the aircraft goes down and the enemy gets hold of the wreck, you’ve lost the entire multi-billion dollar R&D effort that went into producing it. That means that every turbine blade, every guide vane, every bearing, every hot-section part, carries a multi-billion dollar investment on a single point of failure. Just doesn’t seem like a good situation to me.
One of the F-16’s problems was a poorly routed cable to the artificial horizon. The cable had enough slack to rub through the insulation and short out, really hampering the pilot’s spatial orientation in poor or no visibility situations.
GD (LM?) wanted to fix the problem, but the Pentagon dragged its feet on okaying the design change and maintenance bulletins.
That is precisely why I oppose the F-35 as the replacement for Canada’s F-18s.
A single engine aircraft is not well-suited to extended patrols over barrenlands. Redundancy is vital to the safety of the aircraft and pilot.