F-35 - News and Discussions

[KimberlyD]

Are you still waiting for that answer or have you gotten it and forgot to post it.

 

[Rakan.SA]

Are you still waiting for that answer or have you gotten it and forgot to post it.

didnt get any. il ask again

EMALS Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System Test

 

[KimberlyD]

Cool because I am very curious about it and would like to see what they say.

 

[BLACKEAGLE]

JPO counters media report that F-35 cannot dogfight

Gareth Jennings, London - IHS Jane's Defence Weekly
01 July 2015

The US Air Force conducted air combat manoeuvring trials of its F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter using an F-16 adversary aircraft in January. The F-35 pilot has reportedly criticised the dogfighting capabilities of his aircraft, while the JPO said the comments do not provide the full story. Source: US Air Force

The Joint Program Office (JPO) for the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) has taken the unusual step of publicly defending the aircraft's air-to-air capabilities following a damning media report that called into question its ability to 'dogfight' with even today's generation of jets.

In a response to the article, which appeared on the War is Boring website, the JPO said its account of a mock aerial combat sortie conducted in January in which a 'clean' F-35A was defeated by an F-16D carrying drop-tanks "[did] not tell the entire story", and that the engagement was not indicative of the mission for which the fifth-generation JSF was designed.

"The tests cited in the article were done earlier this year to test the flying qualities of the F-35 using visual combat manoeuvres to stress the system and the F-16 involved was used as a visual reference to manoeuvre against," said the JPO statement, issued on 1 July.

"While the dogfighting scenario was successful in showing the ability of the F-35 to manoeuvre to the edge of its limits without exceeding them and handle in a positive and predictable manner, the interpretation of the scenario results could be misleading. The F-35's technology is designed to engage, shoot, and kill its enemy from long distances, not necessarily in visual 'dogfighting' situations."

In its 29 June article that led to the JPO's rebuttal, War is Boring reported the experiences and opinions of the test pilot of the F-35A aircraft (AF-2) following the combat manoeuvring engagements with the F-16. In its piece, the site noted the pilot's opinion that the F-35 had a distinct energy disadvantage against the F-16, being unable to turn its nose fast enough to successfully engage the adversary aircraft at close range. This was true for either attempted short-range missile or gun kills, with the F-35 pilot having to perform manoeuvres that caused his aircraft's energy to bleed away at an unsustainable rate to stand any chance of success.

Further to this, the pilot (who is reported to have previous operational experience on the F-15E Strike Eagle) reportedly said some of the F-35 cockpit's ergonomic features (an over-large helmet for the relatively small cockpit and a lack of rearwards vision) make dogfighting difficult.

As well as being unable to shoot down the F-16 at close quarters, the pilot of the F-35 was unable to prevent himself being shot down when the tables were turned during the exercise, according to the article.

In its response, the JPO said the F-35 used in the trial was one of the oldest in the fleet and had been designed for flight sciences (aircraft handling) testing and not air-combat manoeuvring.

"Aircraft AF-2 did not have the mission systems software to use the sensors that allow the F-35 to see its enemy long before it knows the F-35 is in the area. Second, AF-2 does not have the special stealth coating that operational F-35s have that make them virtually invisible to radar. And, third, it is not equipped with the weapons or software that allow the F-35 pilot to turn, aim a weapon with the helmet, and fire at an enemy without having to point the airplane at its target," said the JPO.

"There have been numerous occasions where a four-ship of F-35s has engaged a four-ship of F-16s in simulated combat scenarios and the F-35s won each of those encounters because of its sensors, weapons, and stealth technology."

The JPO added that it was investigating the leak of the 'For Official Use Only' report that led to the article.

COMMENT
As with most issues related to the F-35, this latest controversy has split observers down the middle, with the aircraft's advocates and detractors taking diametrically opposed views - and with the truth probably somewhere in the middle.

The War is Boring article appears to have accurately recounted the test pilot's experiences and comments (as the JPO seems to be only disputing the interpretation of the pilot's findings not their authenticity) when it says the F-35 performed poorly in close-in dogfighting.

For its part, the JPO was quite correct when it stated the F-35 was never designed for dogfighting (some have postulated the aircraft would have been better designated the A-35 rather than the F-35, on account of its weighting towards the attack role), and that aircraft AF-2 used for the test was not fitted with many of the advanced systems that would likely have enabled it to defeat its adversary when fighting on its own medium- to long-range terms.

However, while the JPO can point to such discrepancies between the test pilot's comments (as they appeared in the article) and the F-35's mission set, it should be noted that many nations that cannot afford multiple aircraft types are procuring the F-35 as a multirole 'jack of all trades' to perform the full spectrum of missions.

Though advanced sensor and missile technology renders the classic dogfight less likely than at any point during the history of military aviation, rules of engagement and other considerations can sometimes require aircraft to be within visual range before engaging each other. The point the War is Boring article was trying to make, and the point the JPO has failed to refute in its rebuttal, is that aircraft do not always get to fight on their terms, and that it is no good saying that just because the F-35 is not designed to dogfight it will never have to do so.

With the F-35 set to become the dominant platform in Western (and allied) use over the coming decades (in many cases procured specifically as an F-16 replacement), its apparent lack of a close-in aerial combat capability will raise concern, especially considering the range of new 'fifth-generation' fighters coming out of Russia and China, such as the PAK-FA and J-20. This concern will persist until the F-35 is able to prove otherwise, regardless of whether the aircraft was designed to dogfight or not.
JPO counters media report that F-35 cannot dogfight - IHS Jane's 360

 

[Susimi]

That seems like quite a big blow to it's usability as a fighter. I'm now wondering if we're going to see the F-35 cancelled and all orders of it cancelled on the grounds of it costing too much.

 

[BLACKEAGLE]

F-35 Lightning II - last of the manned fighters?
Gareth Jennings, London - IHS Jane's Defence Weekly
27 July 2015

Although many have heralded the F-35 as being the last of the manned fighters, it seems more likely that for technological, operational, and even political reasons the pilot will have a place in the cockpit of fighter aircraft for the foreseeable future at least. (US Air Force)

With the US Marine Corps set to declare initial operating capability for its Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) before the end of July, many are again asking if there will ever be another manned fighter, or if the JSF truly is the last of its kind.

The history of military aviation is littered with false predictions pertaining to the demise of the traditional notion of the fighter aircraft. In the United States the Vought F-8 Crusader developed in the mid-1950s was nicknamed 'the last gunslinger' in the mistaken belief that all fighters to follow would carry missiles only.

The United Kingdom went one step further in 1957 when its Defence White Paper boldly stated that manned fighters would be replaced completely in the coming years by surface-to-air missiles; an erroneous projection that ultimately proved disastrous for the UK's defence aerospace sector.

Most recently, in April of this year US Navy (USN) secretary Ray Mabus was daring enough to state that the F-35 "should be, and almost certainly will be, the last manned strike fighter aircraft the Department of the Navy will ever buy or fly".

Whereas previously the end of manned fighters had been based on developments in the fields of air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles, today it is the rise of unmanned technologies that threaten to herald the extinction of the fighter pilot.

Whatever you want to call them - be it unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned aircraft systems, remotely piloted aircraft, remotely piloted aircraft systems, or even the ubiquitous 'drones' - unmanned aircraft have proliferated exponentially since they first appeared over the battlefield in the early 1980s.

Pioneered by the Israel Defense Force as a means of neutralising enemy air defence systems (the idea being that the surface-to-air missiles would engage the UAV, exposing their positions to the manned fighters following), they have over recent years gone on to carve something of a niche for themselves as the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platform of choice over the skies of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and beyond. In addition to their ISR role, UAVs of all classes have taken on offensive capabilities with the integration of adapted and purpose-built munitions, and look set to take on more roles as their capabilities are expanded and their performance improved.

For their proponents, unmanned aircraft offer the prospect of zero casualties (on the side that is operating them, at least), as well as reduced development, acquisition, operating, and support costs when compared with manned fighters.

However, while it is certainly true that relocating the pilot from the cockpit to the ground does remove him or her from harm's way, it is certainly not a victimless endeavour on the part of the operators. UAV pilots have reported high levels of psychological illness following long periods of exposure to 'remote-control' warfare, in which they actively participate in the killing of combatants during their working day, returning to normal family life at the end of their shift. While fighter pilots are certainly exposed to more physical danger when conducting combat operations, being deployed with their peers and comrades provides a support structure not available to their unmanned counterparts.

Also, having a pilot in the cockpit exposed to the dangers of warfare might actually be preferable from a political standpoint. The use of UAVs has proven to be highly controversial, with one of the main reasons being that the lack of any danger to the operating nation lowers the threshold for their use. It is of no consequence to those protesting their use that unmanned aircraft are subject to the same rules of engagement (RoE) as manned aircraft (this is certainly true for air forces, although the RoE of secret security organisations such as the CIA are not known), the fact that they are unmanned somehow makes their use 'unfair' and therefore immoral. A manned aircraft performing the same mission is unimpacted by such philosophical considerations.

In terms of comparing the development, acquisition, operating, and support costs of manned and unmanned aircraft, it is unfortunate for the former that the rise in UAVs has coincided with the birth of the F-35; a project that in the popular consciousness has become something of a byword for profligacy and waste in the defence industry.

When set against the USD1.5 trillion being spent on the F-35 (the most expensive defence programme in history), it is not hard to point to UAVs being a cheaper and more cost effective solution all-round. However, such a comparison would be erroneous, as it would not be comparing like-for-like.

While the F-35 has been built for full-spectrum warfare in denied environments, current UAVs are suited only for ISR and light strike operations in relatively permissive environments - any air threat will all but nullify the use of unmanned aircraft over any battlefield today. Certainly, efforts have already been initiated to develop and build the next-generation of unmanned aircraft that will be able to operate in denied environments, such as the United States' Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) programme, the Franco-British Future Combat Air System (FCAS) and the pan-European nEUROn, but such vehicles are still likely to face the same political challenges to their use as do today's generation of UAVs.

Also, the term 'unmanned' is something of a misnomer, in that the pilot has not been removed from the equation but only relocated to the ground. Paradoxically, today's unmanned aircraft actually require at least as many (and often more) personnel to operate and sustain than do manned fighters. A manned Gripen fighter, say, has one pilot to fly the mission, whereas an unmanned Reaper UAV has a two-man team to launch the aircraft in theatre, this team then hands over the mission portion of the flight to a two/three-man team in the United States, before taking control again for recovery - up to five crew in all. Both platforms require comparable levels of infrastructure and manned support, and so it is hard to see where the manpower and fiscal savings promised by UAVs might actually come from, at least in the near to medium term.

Setting aside Mabus' comments on the F-35 being the last manned fighter that the navy will fly, the Pentagon has actually already begun the process of developing the JSF's replacement and it is not (necessarily) unmanned.

The US Air Force and USN have kick-started what they term to be 6th Generation fighter programmes (referencing the F-35's 5th Generation tag) in the Next Generation Tactical Aircraft (Next Gen TACAIR) programme. Launched in early 2013, Next Gen TACAIR is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency-led effort that is at the next generation of air dominance systems and platforms.

Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman have each indicated their plans to develop aircraft and compete any future 6th Generation requirement, with the first two releasing conceptual drawings of what their respective aircraft might look like; both of which feature cockpits. While these potential offerings are still very much in their conceptual stages, they are said to feature many of the stealth characteristics synonymous with 5th Generation fighters, but also futuristic enhancements in the fields of propulsion, structures, and avionics. Of perhaps more relevance to the issue as to whether the F-35 will be the last manned fighter, these 6th Generation platforms will likely be optionally manned rather than unmanned.

The concept of an optionally manned platform has a number of advantages over purely manned and unmanned solutions that would strongly suggest that this is the way forward for future fighter designers. Optionally manned provides the best of both worlds, in balancing the reduced risk to aircrews of unmanned with the unparalleled flexibility and capability afforded by a human pilot.

Indeed, the capability request for information for Next Gen TACAIR specifically called for the development of an optionally manned aircraft, serving to underline the direction in which future fighter design is progressing. With Next Gen TACAIR setting out an initial operational capability of approximately 2030, the resulting aircraft would likely serve alongside the F-35 for a number of years before eventually replacing it, amply demonstrating that the death of the fighter pilot is not quite yet nigh.
F-35 Lightning II - last of the manned fighters? - IHS Jane's 360

 

[BLACKEAGLE]

Pentagon test chief raps F-35B reliability ahead of IOC
Marina Malenic, Washington, DC - IHS Jane's Defence Weekly
29 July 2015
http://www.janes.com/article/53311/pentagon-test-chief-raps-f-35b-reliability-ahead-of-ioc
Key Points

• The F-35B demonstrated poor reliability in sea trials aboard the USS Wasp
• Despite the findings, the USMC is poised to declare the aircraft suitable for limited combat operations

The short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) version of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter demonstrated poor reliability in sea trials aboard the USS Wasp amphibious assault ship, the Pentagon's top testing official said in a 22 July report.

The Pentagon's chief testing official criticised the F-35B's reliability rates just as the USMC is preparing the declare the aircraft suitable for limited combat operations. (US Navy)

Reliability was below 50% during the testing period, Michael Gilmore, the director of operational testing for the US Department of Defense, said in the report viewed by IHS Jane's .
Pentagon test chief raps F-35B reliability ahead of IOC - IHS Jane's 360

 

[ke gordon]

Again another fighter plane that the U.S. has undoubtedly sunk beaucoup bucks into. I mean seriously what is wrong with the aircraft we have now? The whole thing is just absurd, more and more money spent on defense, when we could use funding for social programs here in the U.S. Let's proetect the people we are trying to protect!

 

[BrandonA]

Tales like the F-35 are kind of the risk a country takes in R&D. It's also a salute to the reliability and superiority of our existing airframes, particularly the F-16, that they can outperform the JSF. Little bugger really was a remarkable piece of work.

Unfortunately, even that perspective still doesn't help the JSF.

 

[Scorpion]

Military Admits Billion-Dollar War Toy F-35 Is F**ked

US Airforce/EPA

DAVID AXE
CRASH LANDING
03.17.16 12:01 AM ET
Military Admits Billion-Dollar War Toy F-35 Is F**ked
Officials are finally admitting the F-35 fighter has turned into a nightmare—but it’s too late to stop the $400 billion program now.


Way back in the early 2000s, the U.S. military had a dream. To develop a new “universal” jet fighter that could do, well, pretty much everything that the military asks its different fighters to do.

But the dream of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter turned into a nightmare. The program is six years behind schedule and tens of billions of dollars over budget. And now, 16 years after the JSF prototypes took off for their first flights, top officials are finally owning up to the trauma the $400 billion fighter program has inflicted on America’s finances and war readiness.

In a remarkable period, beginning in February and lasting several weeks, senior officers and high-ranking bureaucrats finally publicly copped to the warplane program’s fundamental failures.


But the timing of the military's mea culpa is ... interesting. For at the same time as the admissions of guilt, the F-35 was passing several bureaucratic milestones that make it more or less impossible to cancel. Too much money’s already been spent. Too many well-established jobs are at stake. Too many F-35s are already rolling out of the factory.

The Pentagon can clear its conscience of the jet fighter’s misdeeds because doing so is, at this late hour, consequence-free.

Officials previously admitted that the new jet lacks maneuverability, that its testing is way behind schedule and that its software is still incomplete. More recently, military leaders revealed that the three versions of the F-35 jet aren’t nearly as compatible as the military had promised they would be.

Plus, one official conceded that the planes are so expensive that re-equipping all of the Air Force’s fighter squadrons with them would compel the flying branch to first cut a fifth of the squadrons.


And the kicker—two generals confessed that the whole idea of a do-it-all jet is, in fact, so conceptually flawed that it’s unlikely the Pentagon will attempt it again. Right now the Air Force and Navy are laying plans for so-called “sixth-generation” jets to eventually supersede the F-35.


“You ought to think really hard about what you really need out of the sixth-generation fighter and how much overlap is there between what the Navy and the Air Force really need,” Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, head of the JSF program, said at a military seminar in Washington, D.C., on March 10.

“At this point we think it will be a different enough mission that it won’t be the same airplane,” Lt. Gen. James Holmes, an Air Force deputy chief of staff, told reporters in February.

Read between the lines of Holmes and Bogdan’s statements and their disappointment is evident. The Joint Strike Fighter just hasn’t worked out the way the military hoped it would. The dream of a universal fighter proved to be a fantasy.

To be sure, the F-35 was carried aloft on grand ambitions. The twin-tail, single-engine plane with the angular nose and stubby wings would be sufficiently fast and maneuverable to battle other planes in the air. It would also possess the stealth and bomb-hauling capacity to penetrate enemy defenses and wipe out targets on the ground.

Not only would the F-35 take off from land bases like most conventional fighters do—it would also be able to launch from aircraft carriers and lift off vertically from smaller assault ships.

To do all these things today, the Pentagon possesses no fewer than eight different types of fighters. Dogfighting F-15s and F-16s. Hard-hitting A-10 ground-attack planes. Several kinds of carrier-launched F/A-18s. Vertical-takeoff Harriers.


The Joint Strike Fighter program, with Lockheed Martin as the main contractor, would replace almost all of these planes—thousands of them—with just three, highly similar variants of the F-35. The Air Force’s maneuverable F-35A. An F-35B version for the Marine Corps with an extra, downward-blasting engine for vertical takeoffs. The Navy's F-35C with a bigger wing for carrier launches.

Winnowing down from eight fighter models to just three versions of the same basic plane design would, in the military estimation, boost efficiency in production, training, and spare parts and save tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars.

That assumed that the F-35A, F-35B, and F-35C would be highly similar. You’d build one basic fuselage and cockpit and fit different wings or the extra engine, as needed. The military aimed for 70-percent “commonality.” In other words, three-quarters of, say, an Air Force F-35A would match, for example, a Navy F-35C.

70 percent commonality proved impossible, as each military branch demanded increasingly specific qualities in its F-35s. As a result, today the various models are mostly incompatible. “It’s 20- to 25-percent commonality,” Bogdan said on March 10.

Indeed, the main thing the three different variants have in common is their F-35 designation. Otherwise, they’re essentially different airplane designs—the very thing the Joint Strike Fighter program had, at its outset, endeavored to avoid.

The lack of commonality helps explain the F-35’s high price. Each plane costs more than $100 million, tens of millions more than Lockheed and the military had predicted early in the program. Sticker shock has compelled the Air Force, in particular, to cut the number of F-35s it buys every year. The flying branch had hoped to be procuring as many as 80 F-35s annually by now. Instead, it’s getting fewer than 50.

At that rate, if the Air Force were to move quickly to replace all of its old F-15s, F-16s, and A-10s with F-35s, it could do so only by significantly cutting the total number of frontline squadrons. But then the Air Force would be too small for all the training exercises, international deployments, and combat operations that the Pentagon requires of it, according to Robert Work, the deputy defense secretary.

“If you told me we were going to go down from 54 tactical fighter squadrons to 45 but they’d all be F-35s, I’m not certain I’d say that’s a good thing,” Work told the trade magazine Flight Global on March 10. The Air Force can’t afford to cut down squadrons and also can’t afford to buy enough new F-35s for all the squadrons it needs.

At this point, abandoning the F-35 is politically impossible. Producing the jet reportedly involves 1,300 suppliers supporting 133,000 jobs in 45 states. The Marine Corps declared its first squadron of F-35s war-ready in July 2015. The Air Force expects to make its own declaration of combat-readiness by December this year, with the Navy following two years later.

“It is always hardest to kill a program when it is already in production and the services have decided it is truly important to finish it,” Gordon Adams, a professor of foreign policy at American University, told Bloomberg.

Work said there’s only one solution to the Pentagon’s air-power crunch—continue buying F-35s while also keeping today’s older fighters, some of which were built in the 1970s, in service into the 2040s. The U.S. military typically retires fighters after 30 years of flying. Keeping some of them around for 70 years would be unprecedented. By then the planes could be badly outclassed by much more modern Russian and Chinese jets.

The prospect of 70-year-old F-15s flying into battle against brand-new Russian planes clearly chills some lawmakers. They’ve signaled their willingness to add five more F-35s to the Air Force's budget for 2017—this despite all the recent admissions of programmatic failure by top officials.

“We cannot afford to assume that the enemy will resemble the threats of recent wars, nor can we assume that future fights won’t require greater numbers of advanced aircraft,” Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and chairman of a key Senate armed services subcommittee, said during a March 8 budget hearing.

Military officials can safely confess that the F-35 hasn’t worked out as planned because, at this point, there’s no way the military or Congress would kill the program. It's the air-power equivalent of having your cake ... and eating it, too.

Military Admits Billion-Dollar War Toy F-35 Is F**ked - The Daily Beast

 

[explorerx7]

This seems like a real comedy of errors. I am thinking that if it was a social programme that would be giving so many problems it would probably have been scrapped already. However, it's part of the new world order practices, which is not unique to the United States, which says war over life.

 

[kevin341]

im watched is f-35 in action video. 0:56 what is this ?

 

[vash]

Recently I have read news about they are about to conduct some side by side comparison between F-35 and A-10 in close air support. I really think there is no comparison. F-35's 25mm gun holds only less than 200 rounds of ammunition if I remember correctly. It is nowhere near as lethal as the Gatling guns of A-10, nor have enough ammunition to do more than one or two passes. It is also too fast to get accurate aim on ground targets which opens up possibility of friendly fire incident. F-35 is also more vulnerable to ground fire than the A-10. Are they really serious about using F-35 such expensive piece of hardware in close air support? It totally defeats its purpose = stealth... Close air support will have them show up in the sight of everyone on the ground... just saying...

 

[Slam Eagle]

i asked a US F-15 pilot if the new F-15SA will be able to deal with the s300. still waiting for his reply

Even the US F-15 pilot can't answer it , to defeat SAM Missile .. You need Fighter and EW Fighter and Plane Like RC-135 or RE-3 .. Not fighter Vs SAM only !

 

[Dan.BY]

Who are the countries that have F-35??