That said, the F-35 will end up being an outstanding asset for decades to come.
We will be grateful to those who kept the program alive through this phase, as will the next couple of generations who live with it and fight with it.
And best of all, it isn't the Boeing Monica! Boy howdy, that thing is one seriously FUGLY aeroplane!
They are “optimistic” they will be able to pick up this turd by the clean end......soon.
When I was in the Air Force from 1977-81, the aircraft that I worked on was the F-111A. Talk about your turd, the F-111 program was it to the nines.
However, the F-111F was a very capable aircraft that kicked Lybian ass on one of the the then longest non-stop combat sorties in USAF history, and was a champion tank-plinker in GW I.
The Jack-of-all-trades F-35 mentality came out of trying to design an aircraft to replace the F-16, F/A-18A and -C, and the AV-8B. The F-16’s multiple roles were slowly developed over decades, not designed in all at once.
It’s sort of like building a small house, then over the decades adding a family room, and a garage, and extra bedrooms, then wanting to build a new house that has to have all of those atributes of the old house from the start.
Of course the new house is going to cost much, much more and take much longer to build than the original 2 bedroom bungalow did 30 years ago...
The company is also adding micro inertial measurement units (IMU) to the helmet and pilot's seat to dampen out jittery images. "We're going to fly those micro-IMUs this summer," O'Bryan says. Lockheed hopes that the new ISIE-11 camera, which replaces the existing ISIE-10 cameras, will resolve jet's night vision acuity problems. The new system will undergo testing at MIT's Lincoln Labs later this summer.
The system will now consist of two ISIE-11 cameras, one of which will be mounted in the helmet and another on the canopy bow, and imagery pumped in from the F-35's six distributed aperture system (DAS) infrared cameras.
Hope they are using US made chips, not Chinese.
Hate to be flying along at night, in weather, when the Chinese turn the chip off by remote control
Just curious...anybody know if the F35 has OBOGS as well?
Has it been poisoning/LOC/hypoxying (if that’s a word) test pilots?