Availability and Use of F-35 Fighter Aircraft: An Update

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/58942

by jdmark • 3 years ago

37 123 3 years ago

oDot• 3 years ago

Now that they're in use for a while, does real life observation confirm or deny the reports during development, claiming it's a jack of all trades master of none, "a failure"?

pjmlp3• 3 years ago

Jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than master of one.

ryao33• 3 years ago

Jack of all trades, master of none, but oftentimes better than master of one.

Your own words contradict themselves. A master of none is never better than a master of one. None means there is no case of being better.

stingraycharles• 3 years ago

The thing is that in military, it’s extremely difficult to predict ahead of times what exactly you’re going to need. So a jack of all trades may be exactly what they need.

ryao33• 3 years ago

They could have just stuck to 2 or 3 roles per aircraft like in previous generations instead of trying to stuff every role possible onto one aircraft. It would have avoided the criticisms that it faces now.

fgoesbrrr4• 3 years ago

It's a complete success.

There is an order backlog of hundreds from various countries, and due to economy of scale the price went down significantly ($200 mil -> $80 mil)

French is upset that EU countries are ordering this instead of an EU made plane.

F-35 Production Challenged to Keep Up with Demand

https://www.airandspaceforces.com/f-35-production-challenged...

It's the right plane at the right time (Ukraine war, EU militaries pathetic state)

ryao33• 3 years ago

That does not refute the criticism about it being a "a jack of all trades master of none". The military gave it so many roles that it seems unlikely to escape that criticism.

One of its roles is Close Air Support. A quick search finds that it is inferior to its predecessor in that role:

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/air-force/2023/11/air-force-f...

mytailorisrich4• 3 years ago

It means the US are powerful and very good at flexing their geopolitical muscles.

It also shows, if needed be at this point, that the war in Ukraine has been the jackpot for US interests at the expense of Europe.

Now obviously, the F-35 is not going to be bad in global competition terms because few, if any, countries have the US' capabilities and tech, but that does not invalidate any of the criticisms against it.

KolmogorovComp• 3 years ago

French is upset that EU countries are ordering this instead of an EU made plane.

Military contracts are a lot more complicated than a mere comparison between technical specs. For example: - Interop with the rest of the equipments

- Training costs for the pilots/mechanics

- NATO interop

- Will buying F35 lead to a better deal for another XYZ equipment?

- Will buying F35 lead to a better political deal on XYZ non-defense-related topic?

- Will buying F35 lead to technology transfer? Jobs created because (partly) manufactured on their country?

- Will buying F35 makes their country army more/less independent of external supplies/intelligence?

The main reason western countries are buying F35, regardless of its pro/cons is that it is manufactured by the US, a superpower with currently the biggest army in the world (in terms of budget).

Put in another way, even if China suddenly made F35 clones for a cheaper price, the EU countries would no buy them.

H8crilA2• 3 years ago

They haven't really been properly combat tested, for example in SEAD/DEAD. But then many platforms haven't been. And the Israeli Air Force did go as far as publicly post selfies from over Beirut :). You also have to wonder how come locations in Syria keep exploding every now and then.

avh02• 3 years ago

Surprisingly not just fancy new jets, f15 and f16s too: https://apnews.com/article/syria-airstrikes-iran-revolutiona...

izacus• 3 years ago

Since then, a large number of European countries have ordered more than 300 F-35 jets which usually won in competition over the latest block F-16s, Grippens and Dassault Rafales.

I think that speaks for itself - problems or no, F-35 is pretty much full generation ahead of competition, is (now) reasonably priced for customers. While it might not be superior in a single role, it does most roles well, has bigger range than most previous gen gets and has a sensor/avionics suite that is currently way ahead of competition (at least one we know about).

guestbest• 3 years ago

It doesn’t really matter since drones are going to replace everything in the air except transport

strangescript• 3 years ago

They seem to be a huge success and most of the failure claims during development were probably intentional smoke screens to throw off adversaries (tin foil hot take).

Manuel_D20• 3 years ago

There's really no way to tell, as the US and other western countries haven't been involved in symmetric warfare in recent history. Will the F-35 be able to penetrate air defenses and strike an S-300 battery? Is its radar good enough to detect and engage a J-20 without exposing itself to return fire? Those capabilities have never been tested (and hopefully never will).

downvotetruth4• 3 years ago

What genius in the Marine Corps wanted second rate "B" over "C(orps)"? Or did the Navy just win out and not want to be seen drawing short straws and Be left with "B" and make up "C" to stand for carrier?

rascul• 3 years ago

The B variant is for short take off and vertical landing, the C variant is for carriers. Not really sure what you're referring to.

downvotetruth4• 3 years ago

The B variant has the shortest takeoff and landing capability (Vertical). So, if one were to assign letters sequentially from longest to shortest takeoff/landing profile starting with A...

CSMastermind• 3 years ago

The C stands for Carrier.

Originally the STOVL was not planned but the Marines insisted on the capability and it lead to the A/B split.

warner254• 3 years ago

The Marine Corps' requirement to replace the Harrier and older Hornet was more urgent than the Navy's requirement to replace their newer Super Hornet, so the Marine Corps' version of the F-35 got fielded long before the Navy's.

Also, "C" for "carrier-based" works.

downvotetruth4• 3 years ago

If the aircraft were to be named after their first flight date, then it would have made more sense to just name them after the year of that date: A=2006F35, B=2008F35, C=2010F35 or for -6-, -8-, & -10- whether prefixed or postfixed. But they are not and C has been deemed to having further meaning. It makes the military look dysfunctional to not have any consistency and to be careless with naming.

whalesalad• 3 years ago

C stands for carrier.

dreamcompiler2• 3 years ago

tl;dr The F-35 is a dog.

The charts make it clear that compared to older fighters like the F-15 and F-18, the F-35 is much less available (i.e. less reliable) and it gets flown less. It may be flown less because it's less available (obviously) or because it costs too much to fly -- the report doesn't distinguish between the two.

The report also makes it clear that the F-35 is becoming less available with age (as one might expect) but its availability is decreasing with age much faster than the availability of the F-15 and F-18 decreased with age.

IOW, if the US suddenly needs fighter planes in a war, it should be thankful it still has F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s because it's probably going to need them.

Manuel_D20• 3 years ago

Sure, and a Formula 1 car is probably less reliable and has more maintenance hours than a Honda Civic. The F-35 also has capabilities that the F-15 and F-16s don't: namely a much stealthier signature and, in some variants, carrier and VTOL capability.

It is true that lessons from the Ukraine war show that attritability is important. But it's likely that drones or older generation aircraft would be employed for tasks that require attritability.

dreamcompiler2• 3 years ago

Nobody claims that a Formula 1 car is a warfighting machine. Fighter planes should be not just more reliable but dramatically more reliable than a Formula 1 car.

hylaride3• 3 years ago

The F-35 only became operational in July of 2015. It's still a new plane going through teething problems. A lot of the issues are being addressed in later variants. The latest blocks are vast improvements.

That being said, I suspect the plane was designed to do too much. It doesn't surprise me that said teething problems are more than other aircraft designs, but this really should have been 3 different planes, or at least the F-35B should have been. But there really should be a separate stealthy plane dedicated to close air support that would not need to be as stealthy as the better stealth planes should have already achieved air superiority.

I may also add that the F-15 itself received a lot of controversy when it was first released. It was seen as a poorer dog fighter and that it's "overpowered" radar was unnecessary, but it's gone on to be very successful in all its engagements. Then the same critics lost their shit when they made the strike eagle version.

mrweasel2• 3 years ago

Fighter aircrafts are complex machines, and I don't know the numbers for other aircraft, but isn't 10 - 20 hours of flight per month borderline useless? In a war I'd expect a single mission to easily hit five hours, using between 25 and 50% of the total flight hours. Most small nations buy somewhere around 20 to 50, so only a few would be ready at any given point in time.

The pilots have ridiculously low hours in the air per year, around 200 hours per year. The Textron AirLand Scorpion is a bit of a joke as a flight aircraft, but at least you can buy enough of them to ensure that your pilots have actual flight time every week.

I'm really disappointed with the low level of hours in the air for the F-35.

brianwawok• 3 years ago

I don’t think you should conflate wartime vs peacetime maintenance. At peacetime you aren’t ok with 1 or .1% of flights needing to come in for an emergency landing due to some part flaking out. During training you want as close to 100% reliability as possible.

mrweasel2• 3 years ago

I'm not in the military, never was, but I'd expect better performance in war time. You can tolerate a much much higher failure rate during peace time. It doesn't matter much if a training mission is aborted, the consequences are much lower.

warner254• 3 years ago

Yes, there are big differences between wartime and peacetime operational tempo and maintenance capacity.

I flew and managed maintenance for Black Hawks, and while deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq we flew multiples of the hours that we'd fly at home. While deployed, we ran 24-7 maintenance. We had contract maintenance support to probably triple our organic capacity. We had first priority for getting parts, and we had freedom to stockpile parts or do "controlled exchange" (i.e. cannibalize other aircraft for parts) which we couldn't do at home.

One outcome is that we effectively wore out the fleet a decade or two faster than planned.

warner254• 3 years ago

As a former pilot, I will agree that hours matter. Our ability to get pilots 200 training hours per year has actually been an advantage, to my understanding, compared to our competitors who can't afford even that much.

The simulators for the helicopters that I flew really sucked (you just can't capture the feel of hovering, landing in dust or on slopes, terrain flight, etc.) so simulator hours were a poor substitute for flight hours. But I suspect that simulator hours are more valuable for fixed-wing pilots. New single-seat fighter pilots can go straight from simulators to soloing a real aircraft. I also imagine that most of what they need to practice is just button-pressing procedures for sensors and weapons. Doing most of that in a simulator can really extend the lifetime of the fleet.

InTheArena• 3 years ago

This continues to be a scaling perception problem - it takes time to work up planes to full capacity at the safety levels that the peacetime air force demands. Especially compared to designs that are many decades in service. The F-16 and F-15 where initially designed more then 60 years ago, The A/A-18 based on the YF-17 was started 50 years ago.

I suspect that this is just the latest version of people failing to understand how costs and flight hours scaled - the same short-sighted griping that happened when people failed to understand on the cost side.

civilitty• 3 years ago

People keep pointing that out as a counterargument but it's really suspicious when F-35A availability rates drops below that of an F-22 Raptor after only a few years and the annual flying hours for a five year old F-35A drops to that of a 15 year old F-22.

Those metrics might make sense for an F-35C with VTOL but the USAF workhorse variant performing worse than our air superiority fighter? That's shit and we shouldn't be trying to paper it over with "it takes time to work up planes to full capacity." F-35s were supposed to be better because the maintenance burden of the F-22 was too much.

The F-22 entered production in 2001 and Lockheed delivered the last one in 2012 while the F-35 entered production in 2006, so we're way past acceptable teething problems in both platforms.

esaym• 3 years ago

Looking forward to "Pentagon Wars Part 2" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pentagon_Wars

cjbgkagh• 3 years ago

Ignoring everything else about the plane, one of the major selling points is the software which is riddled with bugs. And likely to stay that way given the perverse incentives to maximize costs.

jauntywundrkind• 3 years ago

I chalk a lot of this up to teething costs. The situation, will, hopefully, improve greatly over time.

The second to last chart shows a comparison of the Navy F-35C with the F-18 and EA-18 Growler, noting theatterbfaces additional challenges over the F variant for having an advanced electronics suite. The F-35C compares reasonably well against the Growler, and is already similarly stocked with massive amounts of electronics systems.

Alas, things will get worse before they get better. The F-35 was built and designed with old electronics technology. TR3 (Tech Refresh 3) is underway to start upgrading the core computer systems amid other things, and was supposed to be delivered this year, but has been pushed back and back; the software & integration isn't ready.

Planes had been rolling off the line with TR3 and then being unable to be flow. The Air Force has gone back to requesting TR2 planes even. Just this month forces have started flying them with incomplete feature suites (I personally really like this flying beta idea, to gain experience faster). And TR3 is just the first major leap! https://www.defensenews.com/air/2023/11/21/upgraded-f-35s-fl...

Next up comes block 4 with a massive suite of targeting, electric warfare & other upgrades. This is such a huge huge software and systems challenge, building an advanced multi role highly networked fighter. This is going to be a struggle. But I don't really see this as ever being a fast task, as going smooth for anyone. It feels like work that had to be done. And we should be trying to share & learn through hurdling through how to tie together so many wild advanced tech projects; we should be learning from this (alas, unlikely most software practitioners will ever get to reap the learnings here).

But costs are pretty low per unit now! And we're going to figure this stuff out. It will eventually get better. It takes time, with such heavily integrated systems. I mostly just wish we could all be collectively learning better about the technical challenges & strategies, that these lessons surfaced & understand how better to architect systems (just as plane designers copied lessons from each other for decades), but that seems fairly impossible with software.

Availability and Use of F-35 Fighter Aircraft: An Update

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