F-35 Cleared for Full-Rate Production 17 Years After Its First Flight

https://www.twz.com/air/f-35-cleared-for-full-rate-production-17-years-after-its-first-flight

by jdmark • 2 years ago

73 110 2 years ago

twz.com

2OEH8eoCRo0• 2 years ago

Sexy aircraft. Congrats to everyone who took part!

the__alchemist• 2 years ago

The chubby dolphin; beauty is in the eyes of the beholder!

namaria2• 2 years ago

F16 is peak fighter jet aesthetics, tho I have a soft spot for the Tomcats and Eagles. Both look the part of powerful birds of prey.

Su-27 has a nice sleek look to it but I respected it more when it had all this theoretical capabilities that never materialized in an active theater...

golemotron3• 2 years ago

17 years is just shameful. Sure the aircraft looks nice but the SR-71 had first flight in 1964 and went into service in 1966.

dmoy• 2 years ago

To be fair, the f-35 (some variant at least?) went into service like 8 years ago

But yea, 9 yrs vs 2 yrs is quite a difference

tekla• 2 years ago

And this post is just ignorance.

The SR-71 was a incredibly limited run, extremely expensive, designed to do a VERY specific mission.

The F-35 is designed to do multiple missions, mass manufacturable, exportable to allied countries, and is a general purpose fighter.

Comparing them is pure ignorance.

Jtsummers• 2 years ago

This is the same company that added developers (and had them work in shifts 24x7) to an already late project and expected that to result in a quality product.

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2013/06/19/lockheed-reas...

nobodyandproud• 2 years ago

Shameful, but what do you propose?

lettergram2• 2 years ago

Frankly, this seems obsolete.

Soon we will have 30,000 autonomous drones delivered via a rocket anywhere on earth in 30 minutes or less. Starlink satellites will monitor the drones as they pick off soldiers one by one.

The future of warfare is terrifying

fnordpiglet• 2 years ago

Any real kill bot army is fully autonomous requiring no disrupt-able RF, and wars aren’t fought against soldiers. When your armies are drones the fight moves to who you’re really fighting - the citizens whom you’re trying to break to surrender. Welcome to the future!

torginus4• 2 years ago

This isn't hard to achieve - I think a Starlink-guided drone army is pretty much unjammable - unless you have space based jammers, but once they get laser datalinks it will be 100% unjammable.

kjkjadksj7• 2 years ago

Combat has been about controlling resources. When labor or attention is now considered a resource, how does combat change how it looks? You can’t necessarily conduct the same tactics to secure a rubber plantation like you might to secure a mindshare of a population. Maybe you lean more on propaganda instead of actions that might diminish the quality of the labor/attention pool from loss of life. You could gradually shift their labor pools to enrich your own companies, shift their public discourse to discuss products created by your own companies, and you’ve effectively captured the population without a shot fired or them realizing what has even happened.

BartjeD• 2 years ago

Stealth planes are great for taking out air defense.

Good luck defending your airspace with just drones.

lukan9• 2 years ago

With enough drones in the air, good luck keeping that plane in stealth mode.

NickC252• 2 years ago

Power in numbers.

Good luck defending your air defenses if your opposition can throw hundreds or thousands of drones at you, all of which can travel faster than Mach 10.

lowbloodsugar2• 2 years ago

Sure. And a few armed powerboats couldn’t defeat a US carrier group. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

ponector5• 2 years ago

Not really. You know what is good for taking down air defense? Long range drones.

Instead of buying one stealth plane, army can buy 5000+ combat drones. And you know who has 5000+ air defense rockets ready to engage? No one!

sillywalk2• 2 years ago

Or drones could take out your stealth planes on the ground.

worldsayshi• 2 years ago

It's surprising that weapons manufacturers seem to be quite slow at adopting this trend. I guess they don't want to speed up the obsolescence of their own supply chains.

NickC252• 2 years ago

Well, for one, slowness of adoption usually translates to "let's milk the crap out of the government's dollars for as long as we can without putting too much of our own money into it". LHM's stock (as well as other major contractors) seems to be a good indicator of that.

I have a relative who recently (2 years ago) called it a career after roughly 40 years at Lockheed-Martin, and a good chunk of that time was within the Skunk Works division. What I was able to gleam from him is that LHM sees the future of aerial warfare as a hybrid of manned and unmanned vehicles. The idea is that a 6th or 7th gen fighter might be a "mothership" of sorts with much more powerful weapons such as bombs or heavier artillery , but also in control of a number of unmanned drones capable of significantly faster attack abilities but with lighter armaments or laser weapons, all to replace current dogfighting scenarios.

Fascinating, but terrifying at the same time.

jpk• 2 years ago

Defense contractors make heaps of money on big, drawn out projects like the F35. They probably stand to make much less if they pivot to compete with COTS drones carrying IEDs. So it's not surprising to me that the military industrial complex is more interested in milking the government for cash than actually innovating towards superior combat efficiency and effectiveness.

enaaem• 2 years ago

Cheap drones aren’t that cheap and conventional weapons aren’t always that expensive. A JDAM is like 20k which is cheaper than a Shahed, but way more powerful. There aren’t many ways to beat a modern air force other than having your own expensive modern airforce and AA systems. So you initially spent a lot of resources to beat those systems, and the moment you have beaten those, you can carpet bomb the battle field with bombs that are more powerful and cheaper than “cheap” drones.

torginus4• 2 years ago

I was just thinking that all these FPV drones we saw dominate in Ukraine would've been possible to make 2 decades ago with similarly rudimentary tools of the day - no advanced tech required.

lukan9• 2 years ago

Nope, battery tech was not advanced enough.

farseer3• 2 years ago

No they weren't as effective due to reduced lithium ion battery capacity as well as less efficient small electric motors. Otherwise the 70's and 80's would have had quadcopters too in every house.

maerF0x0• 2 years ago

as they pick off soldiers one by one

here let me fix that for you

as they pick off every human one by one

chx• 2 years ago

autonomous drones

yes, yes, we only need to use a few more GPUs to turn automated plagiarism machines into full blown AGI, am I right?

I thought at least Apple getting off the horse because they realized it's just a carnival carousel was a hint. But apparently people are so high on the LLM supply they can't think straight any more.

lettergram2• 2 years ago

What are you talking about? lol we have this today, swarms are next (and have been being worked on for years).

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/russia-ukraine-co...

All a drone needs to do in what I just described is target something that looks like a target (ie person with gun). We have that tech today, and it’s not hard.

loneboat• 2 years ago

You don't need AGI for drone swarms to be feasible.

panarchy4• 2 years ago

Autonomous drones are literally decades old technology at this point

TulliusCicero• 2 years ago

Tiny drones are having a moment right now, but anti-drone tech will probably catch up in short order, both electronic warfare and systems to actually shoot them down.

pydry2• 2 years ago

anti-drone tech will probably catch up in short order, both electronic warfare and systems to actually shoot them down.

It's not a popular fact but Russia is excelling at this area right now.

Having a live war to test in and a tight feedback loop between the front lines and the industrial backbone has sped up their weapons development quite a lot.

ww520• 2 years ago

F-35 is needed for its sensors, stealth, range, and weapons.

dgfitz3• 2 years ago

The future of warfare is misinformation. Apparently it’s working.

lazide2• 2 years ago

The past too.

thewinnie• 2 years ago

Watching closely Ukrainian - Russia war I can see @lettergram has a point. Cheap commercial drone with granade showing just astonishing funds/effectiveness ratio. Think about firing $150 000 rocket (javelin) or $1 000 drone. Plus drone does not require any special military training and you can manuver during the fly and choose angle of attack.

hollerith2• 2 years ago

delivered via a rocket anywhere on earth in 30 minutes or less

Which rocket are you imagining as the delivery platform? I hope it is not any of SpaceX's rockets, which probably need 30 min just to fuel them up -- and once they're fueled, they have to be launched in a few days or undergo an expensive disassembly process to prevent corrosion caused by fuel residue.

The US Air Force used liquid-fueled ICBMs for about 10 years, then in the 1960s switched to solid fueled because of the disadvantages described above.

iknowstuff• 2 years ago

SpaceX has projected that it will launch 148 rockets in 2024, which would be once every two and a half days

And that’s before Starship comes into play. If successful, they want to be able to fly them much more frequently than Falcon 9s.

They’re not really at risk of having nothing to do with a rocket

photochemsyn• 2 years ago

The F-35 does seem like a colossal waste of money, but it's also one a government jobs program and a cash cow for MIC investors with a budget of $1.7 trillion, which is how the government makes these decisions:

https://theweek.com/us-military/1020858/the-f-35-fighter-jet...

Lockheed Martin is moving towards drone fighter jets under "Project Carrera" although their ideal is to have a F-35 controlling a swarm of fighter drones that travel with it, which seems like a convenient excuse to keep producing and selling the F-35. Eventually the human fighter pilot will be removed from the system and it'll all be run by an AI called SkyNet.

https://breakingdefense.com/2022/09/lockheed-investing-100m-...

maxglute4• 2 years ago

The future of warfare is terrifying

Maybe against asymmetric opponents who can't hit back in space domain.

Peer powers with ASAT capability will just launch a "cheap" kill vehicle to blowup starship + payload worth 100s of million because US put eggs in one platform basket like aircraft carriers where ROI depends on reusability which is ultimately predicated on survivability. Meanwhile resulting kessler syndrome degrades space enviroment for everyone, but US the most because they have the most hardware in space.

kjkjadksj7• 2 years ago

These craft are capable of controlling a local swarm of drones themselves. Its hardly obsolete to bake in redundancy in control especially one capable of running independently at the edge.

jakeinspace2• 2 years ago

What you’re suggesting sounds like an ICBM effectively. Launching one, even if it’s a falcon 9 launch vehicle, anyway close to a nuclear power is not reasonable.

e40• 2 years ago

How Much Does It Cost? The F-35's price per unit, including ancillary costs like depot maintenance, ground support equipment, and spare parts is $110.3 million per F-35A, $135.8 million per F-35B, and $117.3 million per F-35C.

The F-16 isn't cheap at $63 per.

EDIT: the above is not from the article, where "cost" appears once in a link to another article.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

[dupe]

Lots of discussion on the official Defense post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39685612

MilStdJunkie3• 2 years ago

It's a great accomplishment, but it must also be stated that the FRP isn't for Block 4 F-35s, and multiple DoD staff have gone on the record that Block 4 will be a minimum for survivability, to clarify, that's "survivability" in high-threat environments.

War thinky types divide the "battle space" into zones of danger, and stealth platforms justify their cost by being able to penetrate highest threat areas. It's an idea that hasn't really been tested yet, not really, not since 1993. Hopefully we never find out.

Some of the Block 4 mods have been moved up, particularly the necessary avionics stuff, but some of the mods need rework for heat management and other deeper requirements.

maxglute4• 2 years ago

Feels like celebrating someone for finishing the good draft of theirPhD dissertation after 17 years. Just glad it's kind of close to the end. The paper is pretty good, even if the field has changed dramatically and the thesis might not even be super relevant anymore.

froggit• 2 years ago

War thinky types divide the "battle space" into zones of danger, and stealth platforms justify their cost by being able to penetrate highest threat areas. It's an idea that hasn't really been tested yet, not really, not since 1993.

Not sure entirely how you mean, as "stealth" has been utilized multiple times since then. For example, using a stealth platform to penetrate high threat areas was tested over Yugoslavia in 1999 with the F-117. Stealth failed that test and it was confirmed that more than just low observability was needed (an issue addressed by the F-22 and F-35).

MilStdJunkie3• 2 years ago

Full-featured stealth aircraft haven't been employed - so far as we know - in an offensive capacity inside a peer's air defense system, which is the "high threat" regime. The 1999 F-117 shootdown was accomplished with a 1961 S-125 (NATO SA-3 Goa) missile system, attack mass, some good tactics, and good old fashioned American overconfidence. 1961 vintage - even in 1999 - is definitely not a peer air defense. Current thought today is that - with enough stealth - you can enter even very highly defended zones.

Speaking personally, I'm skeptical of stealth's utility against a peer power. Automation, very smart software, and cheap electronics will just be too dense, and the attacking platform is too expensive for the elevated level of risk. Some stealth is useful, to break locks . . but I think the ceiling of usefulness might be lower than we suspect. Whatever the real answer is, my own hope is that the powers-that-be will be capable of changing their minds in the face of accurate reports and analysis. "Being able to change your mind quickly" might be the best skill for a peacetime military to have.

On that front, I'm not filled with confidence. This all smells a little bit like the precision bombing advocates of the interwar period (1920-1943). There are many who, to this day, maintain that the pre-1943 daylight precision bombing campaigns were effective in their stated mission, in spite of all findings to the contrary. Pre-1943 (before the H2X "Micky" radar groundmap bombsight) we were extraordinarily lucky if a bomb hit a point target (not helped at all by the near-fraudulent behavior of Norden and the NBoO), and even if it did, it didn't disable it, because factories are pretty tough and enormous. If we can't talk about something after seventy years, how likely are we to see truth of something happening right in front of our faces?

LargeTomato• 2 years ago

The idea of stealth is tested every day. When missions are planned the capability of the aircraft determines what missions is can fly. A stealth aircraft can factually fly closer to an enemy's AA system without being detected.

MilStdJunkie3• 2 years ago

It is, and quite well. And it is effective. But to make the really deep investment cost effective, it needs to be in the ninety percentile effective, and where we're sitting, right now, in the EW and sensor environment we're currently in, it's likely to be less than that, as low as a 40%. You can see this in the mobilizations we've seen to date. We try to keep them away from China close EW coverage, for good reason. You'll note Israel hasn't mobed the F-35I variant against anyone besides Gaza[0]. Again, for good reason.

Now, please let me be clear. If I am in the pilot seat, and I have a forty percent lower chance of being blown into flash-fried gibbets, I will be overjoyed. I will be blissful. The technologies are super cool, and, in spite of what could be called a rocky development path, they came out the other side with what looks like a usable platform, maybe even an excellent one. But, big picture, if I have a platform that costs a hundred times more[1], and it improves my rates from 5:1 to 9.2:1, taken on the whole . . that was not an optimal use of treasure and materiel. If it was flown out in 2009? Yeah, probably 20:1 exchange rates. It's not 2009 . . there's been a LOT of tech movement (hence the importance of Block 4).

The bitch of it is, I'm not even complaining against stealth all that much. I'm mostly bitching about the program management, not measuring spares, not checking if a widget worked yet before signing it off. Cheap stealth can be had, especially nowadays. And when it goes below a much lower cost threshold, it's even worth it - look at the NSM, after all, cheap stealth is incredibly deadly on a cruise missile or anything that needs to get in the enemy's face, that needs to close the range. But I'll be surprised if the cost of the 35 turns out to be worth it, as cool as it might be.

Eh, but who knows? Prominent defense talky talky type people have said that you're a fool for having opinions about the 35. So I'll just sit here being a fool, when it undoubtedly spanks the entire mainland PLAN/AF and we fly back home with geostrategic supremacy balanced on a whole squadron of fifty-foot erections. That would be grand - I would be a fool for any length of time to make that happen.

[0] Maybe Beirut, maybe maybe Iraq, although in the second instance there's a question as to who they were actually shooting at. But Gaza for sure - third parties saw that one. None of those are even in the same continent as a peer competitor air defense.

[1] Yes yes yes I know full rate production assuming 1000 units the flyaway cost per unit F35 is super duper ultra Costco cheap, 35m or whatever they're claiming now, but I'm talking "whole program" costs. Even using the Costco metaphor, buying the forty pound sack of tomatoes might be real cheap per tomato, but I'm only using two of those tomatoes - in the end I spend forty bucks for two tomatoes. I got some opinions about the whole concept of "flyaway cost", but that's another conversation.

gxs2• 2 years ago

It’s been quite a few years since anything US-military related didn’t also bring up thoughts and questions about the Chinese military for me as well.

The gap between the two has closed so much within the last decade, people just do some hand waving to dismiss china because it gives them some sort of psychological comfort.

In this case for example it’s the cost - sure the US spends billions more on defense, but the gap in spending is way, way smaller than people think. It’s not just a matter of ppp or anything like that, which of course plays a big part, but also just the stage in maturity these organizations are in.

Not even sure what my point here, maybe I was just made uneasy by the person throwing a congratulations out there as if this were some sort of big accomplishment. The Chinese are making bigger strides day-to-day and I don’t see them celebrating.

kjkjadksj7• 2 years ago

The US has its strenths in being an omnipresense. Not only does it have the largest carrier fleet it has bases around the world. It can mobilize anywhere on earth. China can’t do the same. They don’t have much of a navy nor do they have a global network of military bases and supply caches.

panarchy4• 2 years ago

Well the belt& road initiative is probably trying to take care of that.

gxs2• 2 years ago

This is a common response but it seems to be one of those things that is just repeated over and over that in the end doesn’t even shed light into why china is a problem. And this is what I meant as well, people like being dismissive because it makes them feel better.

Yes, the US has a global presence but it’s because it has to have one, china does not.

The US doesn’t care about Taiwan just out of principle, it cares about Taiwan because in a way it’s fighting to keep all of Asia from falling under Chinese influence.

China doesn’t have to worry about parking aircraft carriers off the coast of California at a moments notice because it doesn’t have to, what’s at stake is in their backyard where they are more than well prepared for combat.

Also, the US has to spend resources projecting power in Europe for many reasons, which only makes it more vulnerable to a conflict with China. Can you imagine what would happen if russia decided to go to war in Europe with full aid from China while the US was also trying to fight an all out war in Asia?

These aren’t some doomsday scenarios I’m coming up with here, just stating that dismissing China the way Americans do is reminiscent of the same hubris that has come to bite other nations in the ass sooner or later.

andrewstuart• 2 years ago

So expensive.

Are they still making F18s and F16s?

lowbloodsugar2• 2 years ago

Right now, in peace time, it’s all about safety and proving. When the next war against a balanced adversary happens, what will matter is “what can we build that does damage” and “how fast can we churn them out”. So it’s good that a lot of the manufacturing we need is moving back to the USA. These planes aren’t the future. These planes are jobs and elections programs. These planes are battleships in a carrier world. But until the enemy fields their “carriers”, battleships are more than enough.

Log_out_• 2 years ago

Peacetime? Eh, Ukraine is game to you?

jakeinspace2• 2 years ago

Looking back at HN F-35 posts is interesting. Up until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, almost all press coverage and popular opinion was that this aircraft is an expensive boondoggle which can’t dogfight. I think that since Ukraine, the need for advanced fighter aircraft has been made. Additionally, the unit cost of the F-35 today is a bargain, cheaper than the Rafale, and even the Chinese J20 (allegedly).

30 years from now, I think this program will be seen as a massive success. Countries are lining up to order these, which is a massive geopolitical benefit to the US. Drone warfare will be increasingly important, but at least in this decade, I don’t think we’ll see autonomous fighters that have the sorts of capabilities 5th gen fighters have.

takerjop• 2 years ago

F35 as 5th gen is now confirmed useless as rumor that Russian had one shotdown in Syria and Chinese in Taiwan Strait. This can be back verified with "accidents" there some years back. This also explain why you dont really hear anything about F35 with Ukraine and to some extend Taiwan after 2020. Without stealth, F35 is bad. Hence why the sudden resurgence of F16 and F22 being mentioned widely in press. Heck to some extend, seems like a saving grace alternative B21 raider being introduced last year. It is a waste of money and one of the irresponsible debt contributor to fall of USA in these decades and coming years.

F-35 Cleared for Full-Rate Production 17 Years After Its First Flight

Related Stories