An F-35 Pilot Explains Why the Jet's Bad Press Misses the Point

https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/an-f-35-pilot-explains-why-the-jets-bad-press-misses-the-point/

94 180 5 years ago

pton-throw2• 5 years ago

This article contains no new information, and could be accurately summarized "guy whose boss spent $1 trillion on the F-35 says the F-35 is a good idea."

He also calls it a supersonic fighter, which isn't true. The coatings cannot withstand sustained periods of supersonic flight.

nickff2• 5 years ago

Most supersonic fighters can only do so for very short amounts of time. The F-22 is the only operational fighter with real sustained supersonic capabilities.

tmccrary55• 5 years ago

It's by Lockheed (like the F-22) and we spent crazy amounts of money on it, why the hell is the F-35 deficient here?

pton-throw2• 5 years ago

That's a little disingenuous. For other platforms, the constraint is fuel. Afterburner guzzles fuel. Only F-35 requires expensive and protracted maintenance after supersonic flight.

Which is another area where F-35 is lacking: range. Without external fuel tanks it can't fight in the Pacific.

sudosysgen23• 5 years ago

That is false. Maybe you mean "only operational US fighter".

The difference between the F-18 and the F-35 is that while the F-18 might need extended maintenance after prolonged (read : more than a minute) supersonic flight, the F-35 may suffer catastrophic coating degradation that may be fatal in the same flight.

As for other operational fighters, the Dassault Rafale can supercruise indefinitely the Gripen indefinitely at Mach 1.3, the Eurofighter indefinitely at Mach 1.8, the Sukhoi-35 can if outfitted with the AL-41F-1S (meaning, some operational Su-35s can supercruise indefinitely, but not all). The F-22 is far from the only one.

chrisseaton• 5 years ago

The F-22 is the only operational fighter with real sustained supersonic capabilities

Can’t the Eurofighter Typhoon supercruise?

lumost3• 5 years ago

"Supercruising" means flying supersonically for at least 20 minutes. In a fighter aircraft the salient requirement is often not the time that the plane can fly supersonically but the distance. The Mig-31 has a combat radius of 450 miles at Mach-2.35 and a top speed of Mach-2.85.

If you need a fighter to fly 500 km and engage a target, why wait 25 minutes for a super-cruising mach-1 fighter when a Mach-2.3 craft without super cruise can get there in 10 minutes?

bsder2• 5 years ago

This article contains no new information

Actually, it does for me:

"Just imagine how the F-16 program would have been covered today when they were crashing an aircraft almost every two weeks during several years in the ’80s and ’90s (the F-35, by comparison, has only crashed 3 times in over a decade of flying)."

I had no idea that an F-16 crashed roughly every two weeks while being debugged. I imagine I'm not the only one.

V_Terranova_Jr• 5 years ago

This article contains no new information

True.

And also, the author is an operator, but not necessarily someone involved in the engineering or acquisition.

Nonetheless (and I say this as someone who was severely soured by my involvement with the program), people get tribal as to whether the JSF (provides an unmatched capability) XOR (is the zenith of acquisition malpractice). It's not either/or; both are simultaneously true.

No one in DoD R&D/acquisition fails to appreciate how expensive these things are and this realization is certainly driving long-term decision-making.

aeturnum• 5 years ago

"Survivability and lethality in a contested environment now have more to do with stealth, sensors, data fusion, and the ability to network, than just pure turn performance. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to quantify these capabilities in an unclassified environment."

This makes me think about naval development before WW2. Everyone had lots of ideas about battleships and how to pack more guns onto a faster ship and all these other things, but lots of people missed how aircraft carriers would change things. I'm sure the next war will be different. The obvious development is drones, but I also think about the plotline of the second Battlestar Galactica series where the protagonists only initially survive because their ship eschews network connections. It seems like we aren't quite sure what future battles will look like and the US is making a guess in the form of a $1.5tn plane project.

actuator• 5 years ago

I think it will be a combination of drones and cyber/electronic warfare capabilities.

Drones have already shown their potential in the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict recently. From large swarm based attacks to kamikaze mode, I think drones should overtake frontline fighter planes in capability soon.

kbenson3• 5 years ago

The thing is, if increased cyberwarfare capabilities allow you to exploit some large percentage of the drone force, then that would leave an extremely large gap to exploit by the enemy. If you can't fly drones because you risk them being crashed (or worse, turned on you), then you need some backup force. That might be real pilots, or it might be non-remote-controlled drones, or some combination of things like that.

freeopinion• 5 years ago

I think it will all come down to one plucky and very clever outsider who stumbled into the situation by accident. Oh yeah, and the girl who needs rescued from the system against which she has rebelled.

Stranger43• 5 years ago

Suicide drones (aka cruise missiles) have been on the forefront of any first strike mission the US have conducted in modern times with manned planes being relegated solely to roles where they need to drop larger quantities of cheap munitions or fly Close Air Support missions.

This of cause meant that the navy gradually took over the "first strike"/"suppression of air defenses" from the Air Force and the F-35 was born as an attempt to bring that back into the ranks of the Air force as stealth theoretically allows the F-35 to almost compete with submarine launched cruise missiles.

The problem is that the F-35 is way to expensive/fragile for the CAS role and might be so expensive to operate that it begins to make sense to depend entirely on missiles and drones for pre-planned strike missions, making it kind of the modern equivalent of post dreadnought battleships.

HDMI_Cable• 5 years ago

the protagonists only initially survive because their ship eschews network connections.

I always wonder if the next big military development is actually going to involve more technology, rather than less. America’s main military weakness is that it is very reliant on things like GPS or connections to other devices. What’s to stop a foe from developing jamming tech and counteracting the US’ lead? From what family tells me, the army still teaches people to dig trenches and use old-fashioned maps (among other things) just in case.

kstrauser• 5 years ago

A couple of things make that not so easy:

1. Ship- and ground-based transmitters are ridiculously powerful, and use lots of jamming-resistant tech like spread spectrum.

2. Viewed at the right wavelengths, jammers are like looking at Las Vegas at night. They’re very visible, and attractive targets for RF-seeking munitions.

bladegash2• 5 years ago

As a former Marine (07-12), yes, they do still teach basic land navigation using a map and compass.

However, the skills are not reinforced or even practiced really. It is not as easy to conduct EW against GPS as you would think, at least not military specific capabilities. There are contingencies and capabilities in place for that.

Bigger concern would be the GPS satellites being destroyed altogether.

Which is also why when you hear news reports about China or the US destroying their own satellites using ship launched missiles, the message intended to be conveyed is more than meets the eye.

Those demonstrations are really about telegraphing to adversaries what you can/would do in the event of a conflict.

kiba• 5 years ago

Hopefully we will never find out.

throwaway481048• 5 years ago

I’m sure the next war will be different.

With the advent of UAVs (ex: from the ordinary to the RQ-170 and beyond), hypersonic capabilities (ex: SCRAMJET), and even action in space (ex: destruction of satellites enabling GPS & remote communication, to severely limit an opponent’s capabilities), I have to agree.

I imagine the “next war” will be one with severe consequences, perhaps through means which the general public is not even aware of, despite those known & listed above.

fellowniusmonk• 5 years ago

If scifi has taught us anything it's that destabilizing currency, hacking infrastructure, biological warfare & moon trebuchets are the next/current stages in waging war if you're attacking a nation with unmatched stockpiles of nuclear and conventional weapons.

ChuckMcM2• 5 years ago

Its a well known proverb, "Generals always fight the last war" going back to at least 1934 as a criticism of military doctrine. And while it is true, it is also inevitable because nobody wants to lose knowing that the enemy did X in the last war and they didn't bother to develop a countermeasure Y to defend against that.

That said, there are always new things to try on the battlefield as well and they are. Stealth bombers in Serbia, "three layer" attacks (top B-52, middle F-18, low Tomahawk) or any of the other tactics that appear as "new" in a conflict and then become "Yeah, they always do that." One of my classmates in high school went to West Point and at a reunion we were talking about the difference between engineering school and military school. There is a very deep base of knowledge there. And while it wasn't my destiny to go that path (even though the Marines tried really really hard to recruit me :-)) I recognize that fighting effectively is just as complex and nuanced as making a circuit that has 160 dB of noise margin.

What has been interesting about F-35 project is what was called out in the article, developed during unprecedented visibility into the unvarnished ups and downs. And there are always people who exploit that to paint a narrative of incompetence and gross negligence. The real test though is when they go to war and whether or not they provide the capabilities that overcome the enemy or not right?

lmm3• 5 years ago

The real test though is when they go to war and whether or not they provide the capabilities that overcome the enemy or not right?

The trouble is that by the time you find that out it's too late. Indeed we may never find out.

ioseph• 5 years ago

The author mentions the comms and sensors being the new killer feature, putting beside stealth can better sensing and interconnect not be retrofitted to existing aircraft? Why do you need to design a new airframe around better optics?

Pasorrijer• 5 years ago

Good question! A few reasons. Weight and balance is super important so anything you add means something else needs to be added or balanced. Power requirements are also a problem. More electronics means more power maybe means new engines. Maybe that all means more weight, so you need to reinforce the structure. Which means you're heavier and need a better engine. Etc. Sensors can't just be installed, if you need to drill holes and break pressure bulkheads.

ldh6• 5 years ago

What military role does the F-35 fill in the modern world that unmanned drones can't?

Pet_Ant2• 5 years ago

How about versus the F-22? I wonder which he’d choose between the those two.

dwighttk• 5 years ago

“ The F-35, along with the F-22, is now the premier fighter aircraft in the world.”

Pet_Ant2• 5 years ago

That’s not the same as stating a preference between the two.

ldh6• 5 years ago

He's a former Java developer who is now accustomed to Scala, obviously he prefers that to Kotlin because it's what he knows...

lardo• 5 years ago

do you have Scala and Kotlin reversed? Surely Kotlin is the trimmed down for foreign markets version of Scala.

nemo44x2• 5 years ago

The F-22 is exclusive to the USA - it cannot be exported. The F-35 can and is sold to allies and friendlies however.

This should be all you need to know.

onepointsixC3• 5 years ago

That was a congressional decision and an awful one at that given that foreign purchases would have kept the production line alive.

irjustin2• 5 years ago

I worry the author suffers from confirmation bias.

Does the bad press miss the point?

So much that "point" is the cost per aircraft is nutso for what you get. Something that's stealth, dogfight, and close-in air support.

And perhaps the article is right, the stealth is fantastic. Lets you fire without being seen. But after you've fired it, then what? Now everyone knows where you are and a potential dog fight is coming.

It's well known its dog fighting is weak even compared to other older fighters, but maybe it's also fair to say dog fighting is a thing of the past[1].

Being a stealth mobile missile battery... Is a good long range offense a strong defense? These kinds of things can only be tested, so... jury's still out.

My personal criticism comes in the close in air support, what good is all that money that was dumped into stealth doing as it just hovers above in plain view/access? Also, it does a poor job at flying slowly. It's just not specialized in it.

Time will tell if the price tag is even close to being justified, but I'm still a strong skeptic.

[1] https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/f-35-pilot-heres-wha...

bsder2• 5 years ago

My personal criticism comes in the close in air support, what good is all that money that was dumped into stealth doing as it just hovers above in plain view/access? Also, it does a poor job at flying slowly. It's just not specialized in it.

This is probably a valid criticism, but aren't the current generation of military helicopters simply way better than jets could ever be at this? And they have the advantage that they can land and evacuate people.

onepointsixC3• 5 years ago

This is probably a valid criticism

No it is not. The poster is appears to mistakenly believe that F-35B's would hover for purposes of close air support. It would never do that because the VTOL capabilities of the F-35B are exclusively for short range take off and landing.

The US has around 10 Amphibious Assault Ship which now thanks to the F-35B's are among some of the most capable carriers in the world. Factor in the ability to take off from rapidly constructed airbases throughout the pacific and the F-35B is one of the most dangerous airplanes currently in production. A squadron could sneak up from completely unexpected directions from bases which had not existed in your satellite reconnaissance just a day ago.

irjustin2• 5 years ago

A-10's still hold the sentiment as the best CAS.

There are actually better fighters on a $/hr basis. The A-10 is a bit pricy to maintain. The A-29, propeller plane, holds a promising position[0].

Helicopters tend not to be the platform of choice, but I'm not well versed enough to know why. Many times it comes down to which branch flies helicopters vs fixed winged aircraft. And simply that branch doesn't have the "rights" to fly the right kind of craft given the mission... weird stuff.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Attack/Armed_Reconnaissa...

onepointsixC3• 5 years ago

The price point argument holds little merit considering that the A variants are cheaper than modernized F-16's. At best you can claim the flight hour costs are much worse, and that's a good point but unfortunately that is the cost of stealth.

It's well known its dog fighting is weak even compared to other older fighters

It's more nimble than a combat loaded F-16. Sure it isn't super maneuverable like a F-22, but it actually is able to do maneuvers which other planes need thrust vectoring to achieve.

And perhaps the article is right, the stealth is fantastic. Lets you fire without being seen. But after you've fired it, then what? Now everyone knows where you are and a potential dog fight is coming.

You misunderstanding the nature of the F-35's first shot advantage. It is not merely remaining unseen and firing first. Even if a AWAC's or L band ground radar directs you toward a F-35 it will be the first to fire because it can get a firing solution on a 4th gen before it can get one on the F-35.

Furthermore, it's also not a forgone conclusion that an adversary would know where it is after firing. A F-35 pilot could have moved serious distance in that time from whatever heading the missile originated. With stealth the pace of combat is dictated by the pilot who actually has situational awareness.

rascul• 5 years ago

Also, it does a poor job at flying slowly. It's just not specialized in it.

That doesn't seem like a role the Air Force is very concerned about. The USAF has been trying to kill off their best low and slow flying close air support aircraft for awhile now. [0] The planes are made to lay down hell [1] and take a beating that would destroy just about any other aircraft [2], and the ground troops love it. [3]

Supposedly the F-35 is going to fill the role of the A-10 in the future but I just don't see how that's possible.

[0] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a34907462...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Republic_A-10_Thunde...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nUhDvcGXgs

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hKgloWQHd8

kemitchell• 5 years ago

Of course he does. He gets to fly it!

This passage caught my eye:

The last major reason the F-35 has seen so much criticism is that it was the first jet developed in the social media age. The paradigm shift, cost, and early problems, coupled with concurrency, led to an explosion of negative social media that grew into mainstream media coverage.

Cost buried second in a list of factors contributing to…social media as major factor?

If it weren't for those pesky kids on the Internet!

tootie• 5 years ago

This is like saying it got a lot of bad press because everyone noticed how bad it was. We never got to complain about top secret projects because we didn't know what they cost.

throw_nbvc1234• 5 years ago

Assuming you think the USA should have the "most powerful military" (whether this should be the aim or not is a separate question); how much money is required to achieve that goal and what are your justifications for that amount?

Without answering that question, how can you say that the F35 costs too much? Personally i have no idea what the true US military budget should be and I'm not even sure how you'd begin to calculate that as a civilian. One of the few things that gets passed in a bi-partisan manner by the US legislature is the military budget (apparently for 59 straight years).

It's easy to look at a big number and say it's bad. But it's also easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. The average FAANG team probably costs their company multiple millions of $ per year in just employee costs. It's easy to parachute in and say that you could do it for less, and you'd probably be right. But that also loses track of bigger picture.

pydry• 5 years ago

Without answering that question, how can you say that the F35 costs too much?

How much is too much to spend on bayonets pre WW1 to face the machine gun?

The F-35 is a 1.5 trillion dollar bet on human dog fighters who cant execute high G maneuvers in a world dominated by fleets of cheap, disposable, AI piloted drones that can. Nagorno-Karabakh and Yemen have already shown a taste of this.

One of the few things that gets passed in a bi-partisan manner by the US legislature is the military budget

The F35 is curious in this regard because it is so heavily criticized by Congress yet still funded.

This is coz Lockheed distributed F35 jobs across the country on the basis of congressional votes. A vote to kill the F35 is thus a vote to destroy jobs in your district. Lockheed engineered the world's most unkillable military program and then milked it to kingdom come. The shareholders are certainly happy.

This is, sadly, the most impressive form of F35 engineering.

We will look back on many things after the next war and shake our collective heads but I suspect the most glaring and shameful error will be our willingness to indulge corporate profit margins at the expense of the body politic.

gremlinsinc2• 5 years ago

The current military is like google saying: We're number 1 in browsers and search, but we need to spend 80% of our profits to ensure we stay ahead of the game. We also need to spend more than the 3x the next 10 competitors combined, or we might as well quit.

They'd be broke in record time.

unreal37• 5 years ago

The F-35 program was expected to cost $200 billion, but delays brought the total in over $400 billion.

With a lifetime cost in the $1.5 trillion range.

When you're talking about trillion dollars to acquire some aircraft, I think the word expensive is justified.

galangalalgol• 5 years ago

What are the rest of the budget items that pass with bipartisan support? Is their salary package one?

pg_bot• 5 years ago

The F-35 deserves the bad press. Development has been a mess because it is trying to fill every niche for every branch of the military. We could have developed several specialized planes at a fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time that it took for this one plane to come into production.

While I don't doubt that it is better to fly than the F-16, so would every other plane we would have developed instead of this nightmare. I also am worried that it will be obsoleted with the development of advanced military drones. Why risk a human life when you can just send a robot to the battlefield instead?

tjohns• 5 years ago

Drones are great for many missions... until you send them to an enemy that can jam the RF link used for remote control.

Until we develop the technology to build an AGI, there’s still a need for fighters with human beings on board for autonomy.

kbenson3• 5 years ago

I would think that would be more justification for the F-35 as a drone coordinator or controller. It might allow for alternative control mediums (direct or relayed laser, for example), even if maybe eventually only used to update the general mission parameters of the drone if it's controlling itself (i.e. abort, change target, etc).

_0w8t• 5 years ago

I thought that frequency hopping made jamming RF links impractical and the main problem is jamming of GPS.

irateswami2• 5 years ago

Why risk a human life when you can just send a robot to the battlefield instead?

That's literally the point of the F35: to stealthily penetrate enemy airspace and act as a command and control combat platform for drones. It observes the battlefield with it's amazing "eye of god" sensory field, drones are sent into the battle space automatically where they are then taken control of by the pilot.

sudosysgen23• 5 years ago

The ability to "stealthily penetrate enemy airspace" is only temporary. As VHF radars improve and dual guidance missiles proliferate the F-35 will only be barely more stealthy than what came before it.

As it is right now Russian VHF radars can already guide dual-guidance missiles onto an F-35 close enough for them to detect the F-35 with their radars.

The Chinese and Russians have set up VHF radars in Syria and use them to observe Israeli F-35s every day too, so the fog of war in their favour.

The fact that stealth is only a temporary advantage has been known for a long time. It's part of the reason why the USSR decided not to pursue stealth aircraft development despite their lead on stealth design technology relative to the US - until the Soviet bureaucracy in it's classical ineptitude decided to declassify the algorithms they developed which Lockheed Martin happily adopted.

bradleyjg5• 5 years ago

It wasn’t literally the point of the plane when it was being designed. It’s the fourth or fifth public justification. It’s actual literal point is to make a lot of people a lot of money. It does that very well.

lumost3• 5 years ago

Why do the drones need to be controlled by a pilot who's already flying an aircraft? Couldn't a drone sensor platform perform the same task with remote operators?

jjk166• 5 years ago

That's not what the F35 does. It is a strike fighter. It is meant to stealthily penetrate enemy airspace and strike targets, as well as survive air combat after its strikes make it abundantly clear that enemy airspace has been penetrated.

Airborne Observation and control is a job handled by AWACS and JSTARS. While an argument could certainly be made for a stealth JSTARS, that's not what the F35 was intended to be, nor what it is optimized for. JSTARS planes should be long endurance planes, not super maneuverable supersonic VTOL jets. A stealth JSTARS would resemble the B2, not the F22.

The F35 does have an impressive set of sensors and communications abilities, but that's simply a consequence of being a more recently developed aircraft. It's really not too hard to appear impressive when your competition was designed to use core memory. A purpose built drone controller would put it to shame however.

munificent• 5 years ago

So you're saying the F-35 is C++ to the F-16's C?

sien• 5 years ago

Or perhaps Ada.

hajile7• 5 years ago

F-35 is what happens when you try to apply the agile method to planes.

They all shipped incomplete and have been continually pulled back to be upgraded piece at a time at a huge cost.

Insult to injury is that they wound up with 3 variants that aren't super compatible anyway.

Jtsummers• 5 years ago

The iterative & incremental or evolutionary model has been applied to aircraft for a few decades now. It can work, it lets you build a solid plan (but not necessarily full plan), build a working but incomplete system, and validate and verify your work as you progress.

F-35 was not agile in any sense, it was one of those. The agile work on the software side has been SAFe which is dogmatic, inflexible garbage. However even that was not originally the case, SAFe came much later after the more traditional (and closer to Waterfall) approach led to a clusterfuck of 24-hour a day development and testing to get the thing airborne.

m3kw9• 5 years ago

Bad press is fine, a good plane at the end is good

rapjr9• 5 years ago

I was once told many years ago that the reason fighter aircraft have pilots is as backup insurance to bring the multi million dollar aircraft home if the computers stop working. It was meant as a joke at the time (or maybe not?) but it may be truer today (as long as the fly-by-wire is still working). On the other hand todays fighters are not stable without computer control, so maybe it is no longer true at all, and if the computers die the aircraft can't be flown?

Drones are certainly cheaper and more capable without having a pilot to protect and whose presence limits the max acceleration. However telemetry links and autonomous decision making have limitations also. When drones start taking down F-35's is probably when pilots and F-35's become obsolete.

ldh6• 5 years ago

When the F-35 debuted, it was inferior to the F-16 and other 4th generation aircraft. However, its potential has been steadily unlocked by the engineers, and several years ago, it surpassed the F-16’s capability.

Sounds like the national defense equivalent of rewriting your website from scratch in $LATEST_WEBSHIT_FRAMEWORK. Sure, it's a worse product, but just imagine how great it _could_ be if we halt development of the working version and spend a trillion dollars making the new one work. See? It's better! And the customer is paying hand over fist, so everyone wins.

CapricornNoble4• 5 years ago

>>Sounds like the national defense equivalent of rewriting your website from scratch in $LATEST_WEBSHIT_FRAMEWORK. Sure, it's a worse product, but just imagine how great it _could_ be if we halt development of the working version and spend a trillion dollars making the new one work.

And eventually the Air Force came to its senses, accepted the "pull request" for upgrades on its big workhorse F-15 "library"....and now we are getting the awesome F-15EX. Something we should have been working on before they even cancelled the F-22.

This is why I like the Russian approach to military R&D: they do a small number of cutting-edge products to keep their engineers employed and their tech as current as possible given their constraints, but the bulk of their actual inventory is continuous refinements of solid legacy systems, tweaked and rolled out at fairly low cost.

Su-27 -> Su-30 -> Su-34 and 35 (honestly even the Su-57 planform is clearly an extension of this airframe if you look at it closely)

T-72 -> T-90 -> latest upgrade packages for both (T-72B3M and T-90M Breakthrough-3)

phendrenad2• 5 years ago

I think the point of the F-35 is it's one jet that can do it all. Maybe it isn't as stealthy or fast as an SR-71, and maybe it's VTOL isn't as good as a Huey, and maybe it's sensors aren't as good as a high-latitude balloon or satellite, but that's the point. It's versatile, so you can use it as the bread and butter and deploy various more specialized equipment if needed. The bad press about the jet is stuck in a 1980s mindset - no, not even that, they're stuck in a 1960s futurist vision of the 1980s that never came to pass (you can count on one hand how many "dogfights" there were in the 1980s, and they were pretty meager examples of such).

iab3• 5 years ago

That is how it was sold, for sure. Unfortunately now it has become 3 jets, that can't do it all (at this point). There was supposed to be > 70% commonality, but currently less than 25%. It can't do interdiction, doesn't have loiter time & is ordnance poor wrt. current platforms, is not a great interceptor (no supercruise launch). It is a significant advancement in sensor technology and integration, for sure. The reduction in type number, and the suggestion of the NGAD (both Air Force and Navy, which suggests that they think that joint acquisition is not the way to go next time) makes me think of the classic procurement death cycle. Very happy to be proven wrong on all of this.

GVIrish2• 5 years ago

I think the point of the F-35 is it's one jet that can do it all.

That was the idea, but it is also why the program has performed so poorly on cost, timeliness, and capability.

The F-35 was supposed to achieve 80% parts commonality among the three variants. This would have delivered massive cost savings. Instead, the reality is less than 25% parts commonality. Also, the compromises made to accommodate all three requirement sets means the F-35 has worse aerodynamic performance and a worse radar cross section than it otherwise would've had if the Air Force and Navy could've had their own dedicated air frames from the start.

The much lower degree of parts-sharing wouldn't be so bad, except that the JSF program eschewed a lot of real world testing in lieu of computer simulation. And to make matters worse they employed "concurrent development", which meant that production were getting made while the testing phase was still in progress. The result was that as problems were uncovered, expensive retrofits had to be applied to all the airframes that had already been produced.

In a more traditional development strategy, the vast majority of teething issues would've been found before series production began. But concurrent development was used to try to speed up the timeline, but also make it more difficult to cancel the program.

The F-35 has a lot of capabilities but it is fundamentally compromised because of the attempt to make it a jack of all trades. It has had an extremely long gestation period, very high development costs, very high operational costs, and compromised performance on several fronts. Had the DoD at least split off the USMC STOVL requirement it seems like this project would've gone a lot better.

lmm3• 5 years ago

The argument is that the result of that is a plane that isn't good enough for any of those roles, but is more expensive than dedicated alternatives. It will lose a fight against a true 5th generation air-superiority stealth fighter (an F-22 or equivalent). It can't support ground troops as well as an A-10. It is a more capable replacement for the Harrier (though many are sceptical that the USMC doctrine around that has ever made sense), and maybe it's good enough to replace the F-16, but it's supposed to replace all four of these (and will cost more to boot).

SyzygistSix2• 5 years ago

It will lose a fight against a true 5th generation air-superiority stealth fighter (an F-22 or equivalent).

Are these expected to be in any theatre at all in the near future? Any fighters like that seem at least a decade or two in the future, if not three.

thelucky41• 5 years ago

The last major reason the F-35 has seen so much criticism is that it was the first jet developed in the social media age. The paradigm shift, cost, and early problems, coupled with concurrency, led to an explosion of negative social media that grew into mainstream media coverage.

Whether the F-35 will be successful or not does not matter whether there are armchair journalists or mainstream reporters covering the project, but in this case we can enjoy the increased accountability. This should be seen as a positive effect of social media, if anything.

This had me wondering how many mistakes in previous projects were smoothed over by clever marketing, and how many are being exposed now. Does social media make it easier or harder for the general public to get accurate information on this sort of thing?

Animats• 5 years ago

Maj. Justin Lee, USAF really is, or was, an F-35 pilot.[1] Since he's now on the motivational speaker circuit [2][3] he's probably out of the USAF.

[1] https://www.aetc.af.mil/News/Photos/igphoto/2002209050/

[2] https://thedealerplaybook.com/justin-lee/

[3] https://www.professionalsplaybook.com/listen

tekacs• 5 years ago

From your post,

[2] says, "Maj. Justin Lee, USAF is an active F-35 Joint Strike Force pilot"

[3] says, "I'm an F-35 fighter pilot for the Air Force."

... both of which seem to suggest that he's still active?

packetslave• 5 years ago

He left active duty in January, but still flies F-35s in the Air Force Reserves.

Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/CJ4C_ClB01e/

johnklos• 5 years ago

This reads like marketing. A pilot should be able to speak to problems with more nuance than that. This is just too awkward and too general to be taken seriously.

emmelaich• 5 years ago

The concurrency / collapsed timeline sounds like an agile vs 'waterfall' thing. Very probably valuable but under appreciated at the same time.

GVIrish2• 5 years ago

The concurrency is a major reason for massive cost overruns. If you're building production aircraft before the testing and evaluation phase is done with prototypes, every time you find a major issue you have to retrofit dozens or even hundreds of planes.

But, like a lot of things with the JSF program, concurrency made it much more difficult to cancel. Sunk costs and all that.

mikehollinger• 5 years ago

Slightly related, but there's a great hour-long lecture [1] by Colonel Randy Gordon, who's a test pilot, discussing the flight control systems for the F-22, contrasting it (a bit) to other jets, and even to a Cessna. He talks about the tradeoffs between human factors, mechanical engineering, software engineering, and shows how the software systems help the pilot.

It's well worth the hour if you're an aviation geek.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n068fel-W9I

ummonk• 5 years ago

Stealth technology aside, there is the question of why the new avionics technology wasn't retrofitted to existing airframes first to limit development risks and control costs.

mbgerring• 5 years ago

Who is the US in an air war with again?

CapricornNoble4• 5 years ago

Today? Nobody. In 2003? Iraq....and shitting on the Iraqi military with overwhelming air power made the ground war 10x easier...demonstrated twice. In less than 10 years, we quite possibly could be in an air war with China over Taiwan. We can't tear down and stand up military hardware like AWS VMs. The lead times for a viable, robust capability are sadly on the order of 2 decades. For China I'd argue it's maybe half of that... Our procurement process is screwed, and I'm not convinced most of it can be chalked up to "modern tech is complex".

jlawer• 5 years ago

The criticism comes from many angles.

It IS a very capable war-plane for many of its roles. Much more capable then the harrier and with many capabilities that the F-16 & F-18 lack. It has different solutions to the problems it faces though.

Many of these new approaches to old problems that are arguable. Is a stealthy approach (F-35) more effective then raw manoeuvrability (F-16) in fighter vs fighter combat? Probably if the stealth can be maintained. Is high flying precisions guided weaponry as better then what an A-10 can do in close air support? Maybe? These points will be argued by airchair air marshals until we have another big war to "answer" the question.

But the F-35 has failed at being the cheap general purpose aircraft it was promised to be. It has been earmarked to replace the F-16 in its entirety, as the low end fighter to the F-22 raptor as the high end. This was one of the reasons the F-35 has a single engine. Recent moves are to make the F-35 the new high end fighter w/ a new lightweight fighter the low end that can be cheap enough to fulfil this need.

quelsolaar2• 5 years ago

F35 is good, but the cost of an adversaries old planes times the number of air-to-air a 35f can carry is significantly less then the cost of an F35, it may not be the most cost efficient way to go about fighting your enemy.

War is about winning the economics. Can your economy and industrial output out pace what your enemy destroys, vs your opponents output and what you can destroy.

Even in peace time, this is a major factor. Keeping up with the US on military spending bankrupted the USSR, at the same time as Japanese and German industries where able to leap ahead of both, since they didn't spend on military post WW2.

The US may want to have a good Military to defend against China, but if it spends too much, and not enough on civil industry (and education) China may crush the US economically, without firing a bullet.

You can have the most Nukes of any country, but at some point, you have enough nukes to do anything you want, and after that, any nuke you add is a drain on your economy. Having the "best" or "most" weapons isn't the same as having the right allocation of resources.

csb6• 5 years ago

You can have the most Nukes of any country, but at some point, you have enough nukes to do anything you want, and after that, any nuke you add is a drain on your economy.

If we have enough nukes to do whatever we want (we definitely have more than enough nukes), then it follows that we do not need giant conventional forces, right? We are already invulnerable to invasion/defensive war because of the nukes/geography so what is the point of conventional forces from a defensive standpoint?

This means the F-35 is about offense and conflict escalation - about increasing the reach/power of the American empire. The most cost effective strategy for a nation that is not an empire in this situation would be to drastically downsize conventional forces since we already have a deterrent. Expensive new fighter jets are no longer needed for defense.

So I see the F-35 program not as a counter against the U.S.’s enemies, but as a way to more effectively attack other countries.

quelsolaar2• 5 years ago

Not entirely. One could imagine that China would be willing to invade Taiwan, if the only possible response from the US would be nuclear strike. The US would not go to nuclear war over Taiwan and the Chinese know it.

The F35 is able to defend US strategic interests in Taiwan (mainly chip making) in a way nukes cant. On the other hand The budget of the F35 could buy TSMC 3 times over, so it may not be the most cost effective way to defend your interests...

ncmncm• 5 years ago

Everything he says could be true, but still miss the point.

The actual point is that we are absolutely stuck with the F-35, so had better make it good--or at least take up thinking it's good, where we can't.

It is not correct to compare it to an F-16. It needs to be compared to a whole fleet of aircraft, because it costs as much as much as a fleet. Could it take on 8 F-16s at once?

It is not correct to compare it to an F-16 because you can afford to fly your plentiful F-16s in harm's way, but have to keep your paltry few F-35s a hundred miles back, out of any possibility of danger.

The reason we are stuck with the F-35, despite its still suffering over 600 class-A design flaws (each risks loss of airframe), is that it is built in 48 states. To kill it you would need to get senators from 24 of those states, and the other two besides, to vote against it. It could explode every time the gear doors shut, and we would still be stuck with it, and they know. Be glad it can take off and land.

Sophistifunk• 5 years ago

This is just the drawn-out version of "no, u"

rjvs• 5 years ago

Japan is denying that they have tightened the requirements for scrambling fighters against Chinese planes on course to enter Japanese airspace since they deployed F-35[1].

I imagine that a Chinese fighter probably costs a lot less to get into the air than an F-35 does. The airframe and engines might not have a higher MTBF than F-35 (or maybe they do) but they are certainly cheaper and easier to replace, regardless.

There's an obvious economic and industrial capability question to all of this. A player with cheap planes can erode the benefits of the technologically superior one by simply encouraging them to be used more, or forcing the decision to not use them for fear of stretching supply lines... Thus reducing the required response time when it's decided to actually deploy the expensive weapon.

[1] https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/japan-denies-report-tha...

An F-35 Pilot Explains Why the Jet's Bad Press Misses the Point

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