Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning and F-22 'Raptor' : News & Discussion
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Says who? Honestly, you guys build one half-decent fighter and suddenly you think they have a monopoly on good engineering.
Will be but isn't yet and the F1 was no great either but French marketeers at the time still tried to convince everybody that it was better than the F-16
, hence why you aren't to be trusted.
British carrier to strike targets in Syria and Iraq
HMS Queen Elizabeth's F-35 jets are going into action against Islamic State forces and will strike targets in Iraq and Syria.
ukdefencejournal.org.uk
The F-35 B's range is so short that I'm afraid Daesh might think of sinking the Queen Elizabeth
British carrier to strike targets in Syria and Iraq
HMS Queen Elizabeth's F-35 jets are going into action against Islamic State forces and will strike targets in Iraq and Syria.
Putin’s secret weapon? The F-35
Why should anyone buy Lockheed Martin’s deficient jet?June 15, 2021 | 2:24 pm
A Lockheed Martin F-35B Lightning combat aircraft are pictured on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth in Portsmouth, England (Getty)
Andrew Cockburn
This week’s Nato summit communiqué was predictably replete with bombast about the ever growing threat of Russian aggression — along with tentative references to the ‘challenges’ of China’s ‘growing influence’.
More cheerfully, it greeted the news that ’24 allies are spending over 20 percent of their defense expenditures on major equipment’, with confident hopes that newcomers would join this exclusive club in the near future. Given that for seven European Nato members the principal item of ‘major equipment’ in question is Lockheed’s F-35 fighter, this is good news for the Lockheed Corporation, but not such glad tidings for countries contracted to buy the plane, who find their armed forces steadily reduced to a state of emasculated beggary as a result.
Britain, Italy, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland and Denmark have ordered 297 F-35s, for a combined total purchase price of $35.4 billion, with many, many, more billions to pay to in maintenance costs (much of them to Lockheed) while the planes are in service.
Twenty years in development, the plane has yet to be certified by the Pentagon’s own testing office, which recently reported that it suffers from no less than ‘871 unresolved deficiencies’, 10 of them serious enough to court ‘death’ and other equally undesirable drawbacks. ‘This is a totally flawed aircraft,” says Dan Grazier of Washington’s Project on Government Oversight, an expert scrutineer of the program. ‘We have created a monster,’ said Trump’s last defense secretary Christopher Miller of the program. ‘It’s a piece of…’ He left the last word unspoken, but obvious.
It seems like an accurate assessment. Tests so far reveal that its gun can’t shoot straight; it cannot take off within 25 miles of a thunderstorm, or even in severe cross-winds; its complexity-driven unreliability mean it flies on average once every three days, (a serious impediment to pilot training as well as timely appearance over the battlefield) and the afterburner has a tendency to melt the tail at supersonic speeds.
I asked Pierre Sprey, co-designer of the wildly successful F-16, which the F-35 is slated to replace in most Nato air forces, what all this means for the buyers. ‘Every F-35 they buy weakens the total air power they can deliver,’ he said firmly, since it is quite evidently less capable than the planes it is replacing. He might have added that it also eats up their defense budgets and gnaws at their COVID-battered economies. Denmark, for example, has contracted for 27 F-35s, which will cost the Danes on the order of $13 billion both in purchase price and running costs over the life of their little force, some two and a half times the country’s annual defense budget.
The Italians, on the hook for 90 planes, have already been finding the strain too much. According to La Stampa, Lockheed halted deliveries for a time in 2018 because Italy owed €500 million ($606 million) for planes that had already been handed over.
Meanwhile the feckless British, locked into the program as a ‘Tier One Partner’ endowed with extensive sub-contract work, have subsumed their entire naval budget and force planning to the F-35, since the two aircraft carriers around which the Royal Navy is being designed can carry nothing else in the way of combat planes. As it is, since the program is so many years in arrears, the Queen Elizabeth carrier has sailed off to confront the challenging Chinese bereft of its full complement of F-35s and has therefore had to make do with a loaner force of planes and pilots from the US Marines. Only the Turks have been lucky enough to escape.
They were summarily booted out of the program for having had the effrontery to also buy a Russian air defense weapon system, the S-400, such customer disloyalty being deemed unacceptable by Nato’s Washington overlords.
It is hard to explain the lemming-like submission of European defense chiefs to indentured servitude in the face of overwhelming proof (now ever-more widely admitted in the Pentagon and Congress) that the whole program is a disaster. A generation ago, well-documented evidence emerged that enormous bribes had been used to sell another Lockheed fighter, the lethal (to pilots) F-104 to various Nato air forces. Of course, such unsavory dealings could never happen today, so the underlying cause of this fiasco must lie elsewhere. At least Vladimir Putin should sleep better.
Sure F16 >> Mirage F1. So sad M2000 was not ready before....Will be but isn't yet and the F1 was no great either but French marketeers at the time still tried to convince everybody that it was better than the F-16
But wasn't LM marketeers that tried to explain F35 will be as agile as F16 ? , affordable ? , supercruising ? All false promises as everyone know now.
Apples to oranges comparison. Compare it to an F-16 with the same fuel and weapons load.
Endspurt Kampfjetbeschaffung - Amherd will den «Ferrari der Lüfte» kaufen
Überraschung am Schweizer Himmel: Der Hightech-Tarnkappenjet F-35 hat das Rennen gemacht. Doch es gibt Widerstand.
Goddamn you Paddy !! Trust you to break good news to the French . Sincerely hope a few don't kick the bucket in celebrating this long awaited event .Endspurt Kampfjetbeschaffung - Amherd will den «Ferrari der Lüfte» kaufen
Überraschung am Schweizer Himmel: Der Hightech-Tarnkappenjet F-35 hat das Rennen gemacht. Doch es gibt Widerstand.www.srf.ch
Endspurt Kampfjetbeschaffung - Amherd will den «Ferrari der Lüfte» kaufen
Überraschung am Schweizer Himmel: Der Hightech-Tarnkappenjet F-35 hat das Rennen gemacht. Doch es gibt Widerstand.
Surprise, surprise, as long as the report is true.
The newer simulator was bound to be better than the competition, so that's not really a surprise. But there is a danger to how cost can be calculated if the Swiss are compensating actual flight hours with simulator time instead.
Hopefully the tech evals will be made public to a certain degree.
Real answer before the end of this month.Endspurt Kampfjetbeschaffung - Amherd will den «Ferrari der Lüfte» kaufen
Überraschung am Schweizer Himmel: Der Hightech-Tarnkappenjet F-35 hat das Rennen gemacht. Doch es gibt Widerstand.
15 days ago it was the Rafale that was said to be the winner.... wait and see Bro.
I'm afraid the sole efficient piece of F35 is the simulator.
The only efficient piece of the Rafale is the marketing team.
I'm sure the French marketing team can forge some for us.
Lockheed Martin F-35 leads in Swiss fighter jet evaluation - TV
Lockheed Martin's (LMT.N) F35-A Lightning II performed the best in a Swiss evaluation of what fighter jet to buy next, although the final political decision was still open, Swiss broadcaster SRF reported on Monday, citing three unidentified sources.
No. The world master class is LM. Impossible to compete with.
I'm waiting to see how the fabulous F35 simulator will intercept a real life liner with its radio OFF.
There seems to be an unnecessary amount of early media reveals even before the results are announced.
Just a few days ago, a French paper claimed victory. Now we have a Swiss paper claiming some sort of a victory for the Americans. Not sure if it's actual news, someone's checking for public reaction or just clickbait for more views.
The team that produced the U-2, SR-71, F-16, F-117, F-22 and F-35 require little marketing.
My belief and concern is that F-35 is fundamentally flawed. I believe that the design is simply too complex, and development will be hellishly difficult forever. Therefore I would much prefer that my country - Finland - pick one of the Eurocanards.
For example, now the JSE is late, they are not getting anywhere with it. JSE is the Joint Simulation Environment. It is not just needed for one time: they have been planning to use JSE for validating and testing block 4 and pretty much everything else after it.
I think that stuff like multi-ship formations talking to each other and doing EW is very hard to work on in real life, up in the air, and JSE would help a lot with development work. But - it is not working yet. Is it also too complex?
The Swiss are not planning to fight a war anytime soon, so they can wait.
Anyhow, of course I could be wrong about many things. Time will show what happens. But to be realistic, development is not likely to be any faster in the future than it has been until now.
For example, now the JSE is late, they are not getting anywhere with it. JSE is the Joint Simulation Environment. It is not just needed for one time: they have been planning to use JSE for validating and testing block 4 and pretty much everything else after it.
I think that stuff like multi-ship formations talking to each other and doing EW is very hard to work on in real life, up in the air, and JSE would help a lot with development work. But - it is not working yet. Is it also too complex?
The Swiss are not planning to fight a war anytime soon, so they can wait.
Anyhow, of course I could be wrong about many things. Time will show what happens. But to be realistic, development is not likely to be any faster in the future than it has been until now.