Come on Boeing, show a little pride
Posted on 07/15/2014 12:38:36 PM PDT by Rodamala
Americans should be worried.
The U.S. military has grounded all its new F-35 Joint Strike Fighters following an incident on June 23, when one of the high-tech warplanes caught fire on the runway of a Florida air base. The no-fly order — which affects at least 50 F-35s at training and test bases in Florida, Arizona, California and Maryland — began on the evening of July 3 and continued through July 11.
To be fair, the Pentagon routinely grounds warplanes on a temporary basis following accidents and malfunctions to buy investigators time to identify problems and to give engineers time to fix them.
But there’s real reason to worry. The June incident might reflect serious design flaws that could render the F-35 unsuitable for combat.
All those F-35s sitting idle could be a preview of a future in which potentially thousands of the Pentagon’s warplanes can’t reliably fly.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.reuters.com ...
“But weapons systems are over-sold to gain the political muscle to get them built.”
Certainly that is true. Another problem is the way the military bureaucracy issues specifications. The long design & development timelines and the ever-changing technology (especially electronics) insures that the aircraft will be out-of-date by the time it enters service. This is why the USAF/USN keeps dumping new capabilities in a design that is supposedly complete & reaching it’s Initial Operating Capability.
The whole system is a kludge, but it’s hard to perfect a system that is so complex.
“supersonic speed”
In all of the news articles that I have read, the F-35 is not supersonic-capable or did I read those reports wrongly?
Good info to know... and here I thought he was just a Boeing shareholder!
Reminds me of the M-2 bradley design compromises in "The Pentagon Wars".
"They aimed to build the ultimate fighting machine. They missed."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXQ2lO3ieBA
My favorite part at 5:58 "Colonel Smith -- could you explain why you put those *portholes* there?"
Cheap to produce and maintain, plenty of range, adequate performance, support for rough fields, wide range of armament, and so on.
But, I'm a simple man.
The F-35 is kind of a re-engineered F-22. Biggest difference: one engine versus two.
The F-22 came in with an “air superiority” mission. The ability to stay in the air or to deliver ordinance was considerably reduced to buy stealth. Additional capabilities were added (e.g., ground attack, by attaching ordinance at hard points), but at the cost of degrading stealth when in configured for alternate missions. At one level of analysis, we could suppose that - having gained air superiority - F-22s could be re-configured for other missions. At another level of analysis, the re-purposing of the F-22 as a multi-mission war plane was to penetrate the defenses of the U.S. Congress which resisted spending five times as much on F-22s capable of only a single mission, as F-18s would cost.
As a single-mission plane, the F-22 is awesome. With the relatively small number of F-22s we have, we can gain air superiority over practically any potential adversary short of China or Russia. This gives the President options. But, the F-22 is too expensive to be the main stay of our air forces.
The single-engine F-35 was to imitate the stealthiness of the F-22 and yet be less than half the cost. Flight times and ordinance were low - like the F-22 - when in stealth mode, but could be ratcheted up with external fuel tanks, bombs and/or missiles. The problem is, while the F-35 is less costly than the F-22, it is still much more costly than the two-engine F-18 or the one-engine F-16. So, how does the military come up the money to outfit the services?
Now comes the realization that the F-35 has real problems due to its single-engine in terms of speed, climbing, and maneuver, in terms of the failure rate of its engine, and the challenges (already known and not addressed in this piece) it poses in its carrier variant and its marine variant. At this time, the military-industrial complex is saying we’re stuck with the thing. Strong-arm tactics are being used with allies such as Canada to maintain their orders, some of which are nevertheless trimming or outright canceling orders and commitments.
Depending on how long we continue with acquisition of F-35s, this could become the greatest error in military procurement in the history of the world.
The same can be said for the F/A-18 Hornet. The F-35 grounding was lifted today. The cause of the fire was fan blades rubbing against the engine casing.
You would have really loved the Boeing competitor.
“supersonic speed”
In all of the news articles that I have read, the F-35 is not supersonic-capable or did I read those reports wrongly?
The F-35 is very definitely supersonic. In fact, it set a record as the first supersonic VTOL aircraft.
The F-35 has publicly demonstrated a speed of Mach 1.6 . It is reasonable to assume that it is capable of higher speeds.
Somehow this has got to be Bush’s fault, right?
Th P-51 would not last very long in todays environment as an attack aircraft.
The A-10 is the minimum level of performance for an attack plane these days for low intensity , asymmetric conflicts.
Come on Boeing, show a little pride
Awesome picture.
There will always be problems, because what happens in the real world is different than what happens in the laboratory.
As long as the plane works as it was designed to do, it’s a success.
That’s probably a tradeoff for the amount of armaments it can carry. Fast planes have to be light planes.
You could write these stories years in advance. Every expensive weapons system gets the same treatment from the media.
This is exactly right on. The left is really pushing hard against any kind of weapons systems and the F-35 is going to end up being fine for the job. We're looking forward to getting a wing of them here at Hill AFB in the next few years. This hand wringing seems to happen for pretty much every weapons system that comes online anymore. As stated above, the F-35s are designed to work in tandem with the F-22s and realistically, what air to air threats are they going to face in the next decade or so?
That’s a lovely smile.
In flight test that’s what is done - it’s wrung out to find faults/weaknesses/strengths.
I agree. I don’t know if anyone else on this thread talks with people that have flown the F-35 but I have and while they are circumspect in what they say, there is a lot of enthusiasm for this fighter and its capabilities in the pilot community.
Will there be a lot of hang-ups during a new flight platform roll-out? Absolutely in my opinion as a general reader, but what else is standard. When the B-2s were being made operational, you would have thought that the hangers needed were beyond what science could achieve. By the time 24 months had passed they were knocking them out like porta-johns. All it takes is money and manpower to overcome the typical introduction of a whole new platform.
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