Why would you think the next program would be any better?
These are the normal teething problems every new advanced fighter goes through. The F-22 went through them. The F-16 and F-15 went through them, though it was so long ago nobody remembers. Nearly every project reaches a point where people say "This will never work. Let's cancel it."
But there's no plan B. We can't fly the F-16 for another 25 years.
In any event, the gun doesn't matter that much. Gun kills are very rare, and usually they happen because the pilot wants a gun kill. They probably wouldn't even have included the gun but for some bad experiences in the '60s with the F-4.
By the way, the "flexible plane idea" has been incredibly successful in the F-18.
> But there's no plan B. We can't fly the F-16 for another 25 years.
Serious question: why not? Assuming the F16 is going to be updated with improved technology is any other country producing fighter jets that are going to overtake the capabilities of the F16 any time soon?
The Chinese are pushing on a Gen 4.5ish fighter and the Russian Su-30 variants are nothing to sneeze at. The Eurofighter is a step up over the F-16 but doesn't totally eclipse it.
However, the irony is that the F-35 probably won't be able to turn or accelerate with aircraft like the Su-30 or Eurofighter so in a dogfight it would be outclassed.
It's not designed to be a knife fighter. Stealth is supposed to give it a big BVR advantage.
I used to think that was a big mistake, but lately I'm coming around to the idea that the oft-wrongly-heralded end of the dogfight is pretty much upon us. As missiles get smarter and (more importantly) integrate more sensors they get much harder to dodge.
It's one thing to slip a single frequency semi-active radar homing missile or a four quadrant heat seeker in 1980. It's something quite different to shake a missile with IR, visual, and active EM sensors with the computing horsepower to integrate them all into a single predictive model. I was involved in IR missile development twenty years ago, and the consensus from the test pilots even then was the higher resolution sensors and extra smarts made modern (mid '90s) missiles almost impossible to shake once they locked on. That was just IR, too.
From what I can tell going forward the last guy to get detected wins.
True, but I don't know how stealthy it will be in practice while loaded up with external weapons and fuel tanks, not to mention the large profile fuselage that is has to accomodate the V/STOL capability. If it's radar evading abilities aren't that great with a combat loadout I have to wonder if the expense of designing the F-35 to be low observable will be worth it.
Because, as you said, if AA missiles are becoming so advanced that dogfighting really is dead, having a quasi-stealth aircraft may not be the advantage that it was originally billed to be.
Crazily enough, the program is having problems with heat melting off the stealth coatings, which is why the current fleet is not cleared for supersonic flight. My understanding is also that the sensor package is behind schedule.
I think if the idea was a stealthy strike fighter for just the Air Force or just the Navy,we might have a pretty nice jet at this point, but the one plane to do everything approach just keeps bearing bad news.
It's going to wind up being how cheap can we make this drone to loiter with 1 missile attached? Cheap enough? Cool, just let the litter the sky, anyone dumb enough to try flying through will have to avoid detection or face instant death, so it will boil down to black stealth bombers only flying at night again, but even these will be drones.
Honestly I think the drone approach is where the smart money is. You could build many, many jet-engined drones that can provide air support over a wide area and would be fairly difficult for anyone to shoot down. The cost per unit would be low enough that you wouldn't particularly care if you lose a few here and there.
I have to think some nation is going to pursue the swarm of drones idea and once it's proven in combat the whole air power paradigm will shift.
Almost everyone I talk to agrees on this point and thinks the F-22/F-35 is the last generation of manned fighters (in the US, anyway). There's quite a bit of disagreement on the timeline, though.
You can do a lot without changing the air frame, but every successful aircraft comes to the end of its run eventually. The Russian PAK FA/T-50 is in pre-production and should significantly overmatch the F-16, not just with stealth but with supercruise and thrust vectoring.
It doesn't carry enough ammunition to be more than a slight annoyance to people on the ground. The Air Force envisions the CAS role to be executed mostly by missiles and bombs.
> Why would you think the next program would be any better?
Because if the powers that be were smart, they drastically simplify the requirements and drop the USMC variant completely. Any time the military tries to design a super-advanced swiss-army knife it invariably fails. This is the worst example of that in history.
> These are the normal teething problems every new advanced fighter goes through. The F-22 went through them. The F-16 and F-15 went through them, though it was so long ago nobody remembers. Nearly every project reaches a point where people say "This will never work. Let's cancel it."
Sure but the problems with the F-35 are waaayyy beyond teething issues. The software is way behind schedule. The fuselage has very poor rear visibility, so a targeting helmet was supposed to be developed but that's way behind schedule and may never work. The plane was designed without proper onboard lightning strike protection so it currently can't fly in bad weather. The plane can't be loaded with fuel higher than 80 degrees in temperature so it can't currently operate in a hot environment until retrofits to cooling trucks. The jet wash from the USMC variant melts the decks of the amphibious carriers it is meant to operate from. It has a poor turning and acceleration performance compared to Gen 4 fighter aircraft. It has poor loiter time. It doesn't have the basic video uplink functionality for close air support that even the A-10 has. It is already so far over budget that the unit price may approach that of the F-22. Some of the partner nations that were supposed to buy it are backing out, thereby increasing the unit price.
The main problem with the F-35 is that the military took a lot of short cuts in drafting the requirements for this program, and when the predictable problems and schedule slippage occurred, they doubled down by relaxing testing requirements.
This is supposed to be the backbone of American air power for DECADES. It would be one thing if this system would eventually perform as billed but it looks unlikely that it will and it will cost twice as much to purchase and operate as originally projected. It doesn't make sense to cripple our air power for the next generation becaus of the sunk cost fallacy.
> By the way, the "flexible plane idea" has been incredibly successful in the F-18.
Yes, but the F-18 is a much, much simpler concept. Carrier-based strike aircraft. Then look at the F-35: stealthy land-based, carrier-based, and stovl aircraft that will perform strike, cas, and interceptor roles. Right off the top the stovl requirement makes it very difficult to design a stealthy aircraft that will also have good enough aerodynamic performance to win a an air-to-air engagement after ther merge.
If the F-35 was only a carrier-based strike fighter that added stealthiness, maybe we'd have a winner. But it is literally trying to be all things to three different services (one with a VERY difficult implement STOVL requirement) then throwing a difficult to implement low-observable requirement of which no other nation in the world has successfully implemented even a first generation of.
The problems you've outlined really are pretty normal teething problems for a system like this. The best argument in favor of cancellation is cost.
Personally I would never have produced a new strike aircraft. With the advent of cheap guided bombs what you really need is complete dominance of the air and big, big bomb trucks. I would have bought another thousand F-22s and spent money upgrading the heavy bomber fleet.
- The targeting helmet has been operational for a couple of years now and has gone through 3 revisions. The 3rd revision eliminated issues of jutter, etc and is now more or less ready for combat.
- Onboard lightning strike protection was present, but it didn't have an inert-gas generator (it was removed earlier for weight) which fills the fuel tanks with an inert gas as they're drained. It's not necessary, but it was desired - ground-based lightning tests had it go through 800+ strikes without incident, so all-weather flying is set to be permitted in the next couple of months.
- The jet can take hot fuel and has been able to do so for the past 8 years, with it's primary testing bases being in Texas and Arizona. The fine-print of it's limitations was that its radar, etc wouldn't be operate at full power <2 minutes after take-off if it had hot fuel and had been sitting with its engine idling for 30 minutes.
- It's exhaust doesn't melt the deck, but it causes heat stresses in the long term. The Navy already has a new deck coating ready (called Thermion) which eliminates the issue and doesn't need to be replaced anywhere near as often.
- The turning & acceleration performance is only poor when compared to air dominance fighters like the Eurofighter Typhoon or Su-35, or legacy fighters like the F-16 when they're stripped of external weapons, fuel tanks, pods, etc that are otherwise required for combat.
- It's loiter time has never been disclosed yet, but on internal fuel only the F-35 outranges every other western fighter using internal fuel and is competitive in range against them when they're loaded with external fuel tanks.
- The video uplink function is scheduled for Block 4 of the F-35's software; the reason for its delay being that ROVER was only recently overhauled to ROVER IV and because it's extremely unlikely the F-35's going to be performing CAS prior to 2020 while there are still (relatively-disposable) F-16s, A-10s, etc flying.
- It's original 'budget' / targeted price was $50 million. While the jet's far more expensive than that, so is every other modern fighter. Even a modern Block 60 F-16V goes for more than $70 million flyaway, while more relevant fighters like the Typhoon, Rafale, etc are over $100 million. As of LRIP 8 / F135 Lot 8, an F-35A with engine is approximately $108 million, with the total cost decreasing approximately 3.5% each year through to 2018 when full-rate production begins and the price drops to ~$85 million, being cheaper than pretty much all of the competition.
- The only nation that's backed out is Canada, and even then it's almost certain they'll end up going with the F-35 anyway based on what the RCAF has been asking for.
>Yes, but the F-18 is a much, much simpler concept. Carrier-based strike aircraft. Then look at the F-35: stealthy land-based, carrier-based, and stovl aircraft that will perform strike, cas, and interceptor roles.
Other than the STOVL and stealth, that's exactly what the F/A-18 is, and even then the E/F/G models have tried to utilise stealth to a degree in their forward hemispheres.
> The targeting helmet has been operational for a couple of years now and has gone through 3 revisions. The 3rd revision eliminated issues of jutter, etc and is now more or less ready for combat.
With the updates to reduce the visual issues, has the updated helmet now been put through it's paces by test pilots?
> The turning & acceleration performance is only poor when compared to air dominance fighters like the Eurofighter Typhoon or Su-35, or legacy fighters like the F-16 when they're stripped of external weapons, fuel tanks, pods, etc that are otherwise required for combat.
So the F-35 performance envelope is comparable to those Gen 4/4.5 fighters when both aircraft are flying clean?
> - It's original 'budget' / targeted price was $50 million. While the jet's far more expensive than that, so is every other modern fighter. Even a modern Block 60 F-16V goes for more than $70 million flyaway, while more relevant fighters like the Typhoon, Rafale, etc are over $100 million. As of LRIP 8 / F135 Lot 8, an F-35A with engine is approximately $108 million, with the total cost decreasing approximately 3.5% each year through to 2018 when full-rate production begins and the price drops to ~$85 million, being cheaper than pretty much all of the competition.
Forgive me for saying so but how is a significantly more complex aircraft like the F-35 going to cost signficantly less than current Gen 4 aircraft> All of the flyaway costs I've seen for F-35's have been well over $150 million/unit, even without R&D costs factored in. Admittedly unit cost is a number that is juggled and obfuscated endlessly when talking about defense aircraft but it doesn't seem believable that on an apples to apples comparison the F-35 will cost less than planes like the Typhoon.
> The only nation that's backed out is Canada, and even then it's almost certain they'll end up going with the F-35 anyway based on what the RCAF has been asking for.
The saving grace for the F-35 is that US has many political and economic tools it can use to convince partner nations to continue with the program. But it's still looking like many partner nations will reduce the number they had planned to buy.
> Other than the STOVL and stealth, that's exactly what the F/A-18 is, and even then the E/F/G models have tried to utilise stealth to a degree in their forward hemispheres.
Yeah looking back on that sentence, "strike" pretty much means interdiction/air support. Still, I think if the JSF program chosen either STOVL or stealth and not both we'd be looking at a very different story right now. And of the two stealth is WAY more valuable than STOVL.
>With the updates to reduce the visual issues, has the updated helmet now been put through it's paces by test pilots?
I'm not sure how many flight hours have been made with the new helmet, but so far test pilots have no complaints. It's possible there could be more issues, but so far there's no evidence of such.
>So the F-35 performance envelope is comparable to those Gen 4/4.5 fighters when both aircraft are flying clean?
Unfortunately not; a clean F-16 or F-15, etc will outperform an F-35 in most (but not necessarily all) areas. A combat loaded F-35 vs a combat loaded F-16 or F-15 however is a different scenario and is where the F-35 is comparable or superior, as it's then more streamline / more clean than legacy fighters. To give a recent example from a Dutch pilot flying:
"When comparing performance, I would say that the F-35 turns like an F-16 with pylon tanks; but it climbs, descends & accelerates like a clean F-16."
>[Costs]
As of right now, an LRIP 8 F-35A, with an engine included, is $106-108 million (the airframe alone is $94.8 million). Right now this is on par the Eurofighter Typhoon, while the Rafale is roughly $100 million, etc. Some 4th gen fighters will always be cheaper than the F-35 but, frankly, those are budget fighters that aren't comparable.
As for future costs, the F-35 airframe drops in cost around 3.5% each year and the engine, 4.5%. Beginning Full Rate Production in 2018 is set to make a large drop in cost for the same reasons anything in mass-production costs less as well.
>The saving grace for the F-35 is that US has many political and economic tools it can use to convince partner nations to continue with the program. But it's still looking like many partner nations will reduce the number they had planned to buy.
Time will tell - it is possible that it will be short in sales, but I predict that such decreases will only be due to a gradual international disarming / enduring peace or another major recession; or a European / Eastern proliferation of advanced, competitive UCAVs.
>Yeah looking back on that sentence, "strike" pretty much means interdiction/air support. Still, I think if the JSF program chosen either STOVL or stealth and not both we'd be looking at a very different story right now. And of the two stealth is WAY more valuable than STOVL.
I with your last statement, but I don't think the JSF would have actually been all that much different - it'd be slightly more optimal, but it'd still be a single engine fighter, with a thick airframe to house large internal bays, fuel loads, etc. Canopy visibility would still be roughly the same due to stealth requirements, etc. Possibly the only major external change would be in nozzle design.
These are the normal teething problems every new advanced fighter goes through. The F-22 went through them. The F-16 and F-15 went through them, though it was so long ago nobody remembers. Nearly every project reaches a point where people say "This will never work. Let's cancel it."
But there's no plan B. We can't fly the F-16 for another 25 years.
In any event, the gun doesn't matter that much. Gun kills are very rare, and usually they happen because the pilot wants a gun kill. They probably wouldn't even have included the gun but for some bad experiences in the '60s with the F-4.
By the way, the "flexible plane idea" has been incredibly successful in the F-18.