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What’s Wrong with This Picture?
Is it just because I’m an aviation geek that this bothers me?
Go ahead and read the article if you want, it’s basically an advertisement for Lockheed-Martin that addresses none of the F-35’s myriad shortcomings — its exceedingly high cost, its propensity to spend most of its life in a hangar undergoing expensive maintenance on its delicate systems, or the way its performance lags that of earlier-generation fighters. It has routinely lost wargames against F-15s, F-16s, Chinese J-20s, and probably Japanese Zeroes. (And National Interest published another F-35 tongue-bath article later in the day, getting the right picture on the second try.)
This is what happens when guys with degrees in “Comparative Literature” write about military matters.
New build F-15s could carry out 80 percent of the F-35’s missions at a fraction of the cost. A license-built version of the Swedish Gripen fighter would also provide adequate air superiority in most scenarios at a savings of billions. And none of these aircraft require a $400,000 helmet custom-made for each pilot. But, as with most of the military-industrial complex, the F-35 weapon system is designed to be expensive and remain expensive and that’s how the contractor lobbyists want it.
Published in General
Funny. And telling.
Don’t overlook those AF generals and their affinity for new “gee whiz” technology. It was that type of thinking that gave the AF that flying lemon, the KC-46.
The company where I’m currently working makes parts for it. I wouldn’t want one in my rearview mirror.
Hopefully, it’s not a Chinese-owned company. As usual, the Chinese have as much knowledge about the plane as the U.S. does.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lockheed-f35-idUSBREA020VA20140103
Er…no. It’s actually owned by an Italian company, and sells to customers all over the world, but not Communist China.
The F-35 is a great plane. It’s just not suited for any of the myriad jobs it’s supposedly going to do, because it is compromised by trying to do the rest of those jobs.
It does excel as a budget superiority fighter. I’m surprised that Air Force hasn’t tried to kill the C-130, C-17, and C-5 by designing a cargo pod for the F-35, and letting it claim that funding too.
There’s (supposedly) always another side to the story, but even allowing that I haven’t sought the pro-contractor side out, I already find this post extremely convincing. VTK does a great job sketching out the problems in a way that a layman like me can understand.
Also, for anyone that cares, this is an excellent story that shows how we simply hand over our secret technology to the Chinese. No excuse for this, but it’s been happening for the last 30 or 40 years.
https://www.19fortyfive.com/2021/05/how-china-got-its-hands-on-secret-f-22-and-f-35-fighter-technology/
What really bothers you is the fact that they used a picture of the F-22 in the banner for an article about the F-35, right?
How is it going to get there?
Yes.
A far better airplane they killed.
When I criticized the F35 here, there was a lot of push back fromR>.
There are three fundamental flaws with the F 35.
The first is that the wide front fuselage needed to accommodate the F 35B lift fan is like forcing the F 35A and C to push a barn door through the air.
This kills their range and their maneuvering ability.
The second is a revolutionary problem. Software. Any change has to be certified for all three versions of the aircraft. This creates a cyclical nightmare of testing on each version and further fixes when a problem shows up. Thus a simple software change may take many times as long to certify vs. on a single version aircraft.
The third is that we gratuitously sabotaged stealthiness based upon the delusion that we could keep secret the more advanced technology that was available. Thus we shut down F 22 production at a time when Israel, Japan, RoK, and Saudi Arabia were lining up to buy more than we actually built for ourselves.
Is that true? I have no idea. I’m still puzzling over the words above the picture. “…Winning Heart[sic] and Minds…”
Yes, the picture is wrong, and I believe that the grammar is actually a Freudian slip, revealing more about our reptilian overlord than was supposed to be said.
Budget? Multi-role?
You’d have to work hard to convince me of that.
“Budget superiority fighters” would not cost $100 Million a copy and would actually achieve air superiority.
As a bomb truck for penetrating well-defended targets, OK, that’s a thing the F-35 is probably good at, provided the target is within 600 miles of the plane’s base. Its range sucks. Also, you have to not mind it spending a week or two in the hangar for maintenance after each mission. But a few hundred around for those kinds of mission, OK.
The flyaway cost of a Saab Gripen is $60M; for an aircraft that’s faster and has a larger combat radius. The F-15EX would have a similar per-unit cost to the F-35, but costs $10,000 less per hour to operate, flies higher and faster than the F-35, and carries a bigger weapons load.
I claim no special insight into the matter and I am interested in the comments and opinions so far…but I cannot help but think that Jim Mora would have something to say on the subject:
I agree, he did do that. But he failed to answer the question in the title.
Let me take his second question first, because he used it to give us puzzle-solvers an intriguing clue:
The hint is, “Look for something technical, something that only an aviation geek would notice.”
I think I figured out the answer to the title question, using that clue.
My first hypothesis was “It is something technical about either the plane in its environment (its orientation to earth, eg.) or the configuration of the control surfaces of the aircraft), or a combination of the two.
It would have to be something that the reader would be able to figure out from common aviation knowledge, not some intricate detail specific to the F35 that only a geek could possibly know. Otherwise, the puzzle would be no fun, and he would have just taught us what that detail is and been done with it.
But I could see nothing. It looked like maybe the leading edge flap-thingies were slightly extended, but even if they were, there was no obvious reason for them not to be.
I gave up on that line of inquiry and went to something more obvious: it must be the wrong aircraft. That’s got to be it!
I knew it wasn’t an F15 or an F4, and that it was a modern plane–not Vietnam War-era. But although there are some fighter jets that I can tell one from the other, the F35 is not one of them.
The only possibility for me was that it is an F22.
I did a bunch of browsing on the Interwebs, always avoiding Wikipedia–whose Wizard-in-Chief has decided to punish me for using his site, with incessant accusations of not giving him money (but without offering me a deal I can’t refuse, which would be “I’ll give you money to support the good you do wrt technical subjects if you are willing and able to segregate it from the money you use for wokeist brainwashing on political subjects.)
That meant looking for pictures of the two aircraft that would clearly identify this as an F22 and not an F35.
That turned up some tantalizing visual clues. There was something subtly different about the smoothness v. angularity of the plan view sheer lines of the for-sure F35 photos on the web, and this photo, even head-on.
But I had to give in. Needed a plan view of both aircraft. Went to Wikipedia and here is my guess:
This photo is of an F22!
Note: I had not read Comment #9 before posting this. I am nothing if not an honest man.
@roberto, @vthek, “budget superiority fighter” means that’s the battlespace it’s optimized to win. The F-35 program eats other programs by claiming to do those jobs too. Fighter for budget superiority, not superiority fighter on a budget.
The F-22 has two engines, which are apparent in this photo (count the exhausts, not the intakes). F-35 just has one.
Also, the F-22 has a canopy that the pilot can look behind. F-35 pilots have a wall behind the cockpit and cannot see what’s behind the aircraft without their $400,000 customized-for-each-pilot flight helmets. Similarly, the KC-46 opted to replace the manually operated refueling boom with a remotely operated one. It hasn’t worked so well.
More particularly, “budget superiority fighter” not “budget air superiority fighter”.
That’s partially due to the Marines. If you did not need the wide fuselage like to accommodate the lift fan, you could raise up the cockpit and have a ventral intake like the F-16 or proposed Ruskie Su-75.
Oh I’ve heard the rationale, it was always an insane idea.
I smelled a rat starting when I heard the AF top brass claim that the F-35 would replace the A-10.
I remember reading the account of a fighter jockey who was dismayed to learn that his unit was being converted to the A-10 – until he flew one. He loves them.
Being a humble, knuckle-dragging “earth-pig,” I have little to add to the technical discussions of the air-power technicians in the thread. I used to point to the F-35 and all it’s associated nonsense as being evidence that the entire US Air Force ought to be returned to its status as the “Army Air Corps”…
However, having watched what happened in Afghanistan in the last year, and reflected upon the fact that the US Army hasn’t had a real coherent strategic vision of itself for at least a decade, I can’t honestly claim the Army has any actual “adult” leadership to lend to the USAF anyway.
Bottom line: Buy and build more A-10’s (we can’t have too many of those). Scrap the F-35, and buy more F-15EX’s, F-16’s, a bunch of those Saab dudes, and maybe a select group of F-22’s for special deep-strike capacity missions. The F-35 sucks.
Good luck with that. The powers that be (on many levels) made sure that cannot happen.
Yeah, I know…but it’s not like any of my other recommendations are ever going to see the light of day, either.
Instant classic.
And certainly true if the F-35 can’t make it out of the hangar.