F-35 Fighters Are Grounded

[Gman]

RPM, I thought the F14 was one of the FEW planes procured that was focused primarily on A2A combat, or a "single" job as opposed to many like the F16/F18 etc.  I'd always read that the F15A and C as well as the F14 were purpose built, the former a Fighter, the later a fleet interceptor?  I know that they both had the capability to drop bombs, and in later life the F14 had very good precision guided bomb dropping ability, and the F15E of course grew out of the F15 A, but wasn't the Tomcat program initially all about focusing on killing Soviet bombers, cruise missiles, and the odd long range fighter escort out at sea?

I'm not trying to start an argument with you, I don't know enough about the subject to be an expert, but I'm interested in what reasons you have for specifically saying that the F14 program was a disaster?  I read somewhere recently that the early engines were responsible for over a third of the airframe loses with the F14A's, and that can obviously be laid in large part at the door of the manufacturer of those power plants, which I realize is a huge part of the fighter, it's beating heart.  Despite this I'd always had the impression that the Navy was happy with what they got out of the F14, and that the F18, even the Super Hornet, made a poor replacement.

Gsholz, I've always admired Norway's military, in particular it's air force.  Canada has participated in a ton of exercises with you guys back when you secured the Northern flank vs the Soviets, and always kept excellent relations and considered Norway a strong ally and great training partner.  It's ridiculous that Canada with 35 million people and our economy is planning on buying only 65 F35's, if the sale EVEN goes through now, when Norway is buying over 50.  Our military is getting pressure from all corners to find "alternatives", but our RCAF needs a jack of all trades,and even if the F22 was available, it wouldn't suit us due to the limited attack capability.  The Grippen, Typhoon, Super Hornet, Rafale...they are all gen 4 or 4.5 fighters not much better than our upgraded F18's in terms of capability.  The only real option out there is the F35 for us, take it or leave it.  Our fighters are TIMED OUT.  Some are approaching 7 and 8 thousand hours on their airframes.  

This is a quote from a Calgary board where I guy I know who works ground crew, radar tech for our CF18 fleet.

You have no idea how much maintenance it takes to keep one flying, its slowly becoming the sea king of the fighter world. Available parts are decreasing, things are starting to break that we've never seen before and there are no known fixes. The fleet doesn't have very much time left - 5 years tops.

One point he also made is that the F35 will have 55% greater fuel capacity internally than the F18, and in a country that is vast like Canada, this alone is a huge positive for the RCAF.  Is it going to be perfect?  No.  Will there be even more teething problems. Yes, that's just how procurement works now a days I guess.  

[Mace2004]

Remember when the Navy bought that overmodeled, oversized, overpriced, experimental "do all" swing wing contraption? Remember all those crashes after it was introduced?
What a disaster that turned out to be.
(Image removed from quote.)

Yeah, I have a few hours in that piece of trash, a real disaster.  It was so bad that it was only the fastest fighter in the US military's inventory and could only launch from a CV with more ordnance than a B-17. Pathetic.  Another huge part of the disaster was that it was the only fighter in the world that could engage up to six targets at the same time and at ranges triple those of other fighters.  Who the heck wants to do that?  Guns, baby, it's all about guns!  And I don't know if they thought they'd run out of places to store fuel on the ground but someone had the bright idea of hiding 20,000lbs of it in an airplane.  Good thing they made it so big otherwise they'd have been unable to hide all that gas in it.  The downside was that to burn it all up they made us fly 500 miles away from the boat all by ourselves and thousands of miles from the nearest land with nothing but a bunch of Phoenix, Sparrow, and Sidewinder missiles (and puny 20MM rotary cannon) to defend ourselves.  I'll tell  you that sucked because it got awful lonely (that's why I really think they made it a two-seater, so pilots won't get lonely).  Of course sometimes, we flew a thousand miles to a target overland which is scary because if you eject there's no water to land in.  Unfortunately, TOPGUN had it wrong, you can't just go into a flat spin and head out to sea!

And then there that rube goldberg "experimental" contraption of a swing wing, wow, dude, you are so right, did that ever suck!  I don't know what Grumman was thinking when it decided to make the F-14 lighter and more efficient with those moving thingiees that don't stay where they're supposed to stay.  What did they think they were doing, building a bird or did they just run out of rivits to properly fasten those things into place?  Jeeze!  With that darn wing spread out the thing thought it was a sail plane and kept wanting to turn and turn and turn.  It turned with F-4's and F-5's and F-16's and F-15's, and anything else out there.  That sucked because all that turning always made me sweaty and tired and I hate being sweaty and tired.  With the darn wings back you could hardly see the wingtips which scared me.  It was like "how the heck is this hunk of junk flying without wings?"  When you thought about it you also realized that without the wings sticking out there isn't enough drag to keep you slow which means, YES you went even faster just like a runaway rollercoaster and who wants to be in one of those?  Who wants to be in a zoom climb to over 50,000 ft at Mach 1.4 and look out the side and see nothing but air and a curved horizion?  Not me, I'll tell you, that is scary shxt!  And, as if all that crap wasnt enough of a problem, they kept wanting us to takeoff AND land on a darned boat with this turd! Christ on a cross, what were they thinking? I don't think that I have to mention that boats don't have liquor or golf courses or shopping malls. Sucky, sucky, sucky.

Then the plane got old giving the Navy the opportunity to really screw it up by giving it new engines as if being the fastest isn't scary enough!  It was already fast and now they made it accelerate like a raped ape and you know what they say about raped apes.  THEY ARE NOT HAPPY CAMPERS!  It was also inflexible, so inflexible that the Navy decided to add air-to-ground capabilities to it when it was half-way through its service life.  What a joke!  You know what they say about old dogs and new tricks and they're going and turn this hunk of junk into a trash hauler.  Sure, it had better bombing accuracy and loiter time while carrying more ordnance and spent less time on the tanker and more over the target area than the Hornet in Afghanistan but who the heck wants to do air-to-ground? What a sucky mission, you got every swinging dick on the ground shooting at you and that's just plain icky.

Yeah, that plane really, really sucked.  We really would have been much better off if we had just bought the F-111 that SECDEF McNamara wanted the Navy to buy with the Air Force.  Given how sucky it was I never did figure out why it stayed around for 36 years.  Looking back I guess I just didn't realize how totally screwed I was and just how lucky I am to have survived that disaster.  I suppose my perspective was skewed by youthful exuberance and ignorance or maybe it was that time I came from from our two week ACM readiness program with an 18-1 kill ratio in that hunk of junk. I'll just count myself lucky to be one of the few that survived.   

[Bodhi]

Waste of money.

[Tank-Ace]

Honestly, I just don't get why they can't use existing work, and improve on it. Or just make two versions of the F-22, one with the full suite, the other a more stripped-down multirole platform.


Unit cost can drop a lot if you crank out more than a few hundred.

[Mace2004]

Honestly, I just don't get why they can't use existing work, and improve on it. Or just make two versions of the F-22, one with the full suite, the other a more stripped-down multirole platform.


Unit cost can drop a lot if you crank out more than a few hundred.

Because of the compromises involved with making an aircraft that fulfills multiple roles.  About the only way you could do everything would be to take the most difficult, the VTOL/STOVL version for everybody.  Unfortunately, that means that it's heavier and has a significantly shorter range than any of the other versions.  It would have to have the complex fan and pivoting nozzle of the VTOL/STOVL and still have to have the bigger wing and heavier landing gear and tailhook of the CV version along with both a Navy probe and USAF boom receptacle of the USAF for refueling.  All of the added weight would mean they'd have to build an even more powerful version of the VTOL engine and since greater power means more fuel use either accept reduced range and payload or they'd have to make it bigger for more fuel which makes it heavier....etc., etc., etc.  It's a vicious circle and such a plane would be an utter failure.

I'm not a big fan of the F-35 because of its single engine.  I've always laughed at the idea that P&W could build an engine they claimed would never fail and wouldn't want to be 200nm from the boat when the failure (that couldn't happen) happens.  Also, the turbine problems simply demonstrate that even a modern engine designed for the maximum performance requirements of a tactical jet fighter is so highly stressed that they will have failures.  I don't doubt that they'll fix this problem but I still don't like the single engine concept because there are just too many ways a fighter engine can and will fail.  That said, this is where we are.  There are no alternatives to the F-35 and, thanks to cutbacks, no backup engine to throw in it so we are where we are.  Either build these planes or accept a second rate tactical air force.

[GScholz]

It can't replace the A-10 because it has no big gun, carries a pathetic ordinance load, has very limited loiter time and can't take any damage at all. Stand off point and click cannot support troops like a big fat flying tank who can put eyes and ordinance on the target or even a big burst of 30-mm angry bees.

They should refit the A-10s, roll back the airframes or even manufacture new ones employing composites and the latest avionics.

Could you be more wrong?

The F-35A carries an excellent gun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAU-12_Equalizer#GAU-22.2FA

The F-35A can carry 18,000 lbs ord on six external and four internal pylons. That's 2,000 lbs more ord than the A-10 can carry.

The F-35A has TWICE the combat radius of the A-10 on internal fuel. That also translates into longer loiter time at similar range.

The F-35A can trade ord capacity for stealth and operate in threat environments that would mean certain death for the A-10.

The F-35A can effectively protect itself from airborne threats as well as ground threats. The A-10 is a sitting duck to enemy fighters.

[GScholz]

Again, Harrier only has a single engine and it perfoms exceptionally well

It hardly performs well. It is subsonic, and the engine placement makes it especially vulnerable to IR missiles. The U.S. Marines lost a disproportionately amount of AV-8s during the Gulf War.

[Mace2004]

It's still essentially three separate models. Imagine the manufacturing logistics and parts numbers involved. The design brief could have been solved with one aircraft, had they employed a more holistic design approach. That is my main point.

I'm only discussing design here, I am well aware of the business aspect which I must note often encourages complication.

They are as similar as can be expected given the big differences in requirements for three services (plus the international partners).  No design brief could have been solved with one aircraft.  The fact that there are differences has nothing to do with "holistic" or non-holisitc approaches.  You could no more design a single fighter with the required performance to meet all of these requirements than you can design a car that can win both the Indianapolis 500 and the Baja 500.  See my post to Tank Ace above.

The F-35 was designed to have as much in common across the entire fleet of aircraft as possible and part of the problem has been caused by just such an "holistic" approach.  There has never been a jet fighter built as a land-based plane that's ever been successfully converted to Navy use.  It has worked the other way around (like with the F-4) so it might be possible to force the USAF to accept the big-wing Navy version and just add a USAF refueling system and lighter landing gear but you'd still have to figure out how to make the plane into a VTOL/STOVL.  

Also, be careful when you throw out stuff like "the business aspect."  That's an old saw and it certainly has happened but from my experience it's usually the services that drive up costs by adding requirements to the design.  I personally saw this with the F-14D program and the majority of cost increases were directly related to the Navy adding additional requirements as the plane was being developed while Grumman did everything they could to control the cost.  In actuality, the contractor wants to sell planes and they know that as the price keeps going up their profits will either go down due to decreased buys, eating the cost increases themselves, or flat out cancellation as happened with the D.  US military contractors are not angels but are far more observant of these things than they're given credit for and when a program gets in trouble it's easy for the service program office to lay all the blame on the evil contractor.

[Rino]

The most glaring issue that I can see is that f-22/35 and the like are simply technical exercises. Why do the US need to have a new and stealthy air superiority fighter? Or the UK with the Typhoon, a pointless piece of crap however beautiful it is, because we have no one to fight with it.  Are we gearing up for an air war with China? Otherwise I doubt tge Taliban are about to launch their new F15 killer anytime soon.
We scrapped the most versatile and potent close support aircraft ever made with the Harrier. I guarantee you the troops on the ground would take Harriers every time over Typhoons or the fragile F35.

     The Harrier had a major problem with heatseekers during Desert Storm.  That huge engine with the central exhausts made it very hard to
evade them, plus it's not particularly fast..although very nimble.

[Mace2004]

     The Harrier had a major problem with heatseekers during Desert Storm.  That huge engine with the central exhausts made it very hard to
evade them, plus it's not particularly fast..although very nimble.

And has an extremely short range and tiny ordnance load.  The most versitile, maybe.  The most potent? Not by a long shot. 

[nrshida]

Could you be more wrong?

Perhaps if I made a concerted effort. But, you can't operate an F-35A from an improvised airstrip or a carrier. You are right about the bomb load when you include the external hardpoints (but then lose your stealth) and I thought the internal bay had some restrictions. The cannon has 180 rounds of 25-mm versus over 1,100 rounds of 30-mm in the A-10 and resilience to ground fire is very poor. Plus it has one engine.

Perhaps you are right and it will 'do' but it's not really a direct replacement.

No design brief could have been solved with one aircraft.  

I think you can if you design for the most restrictive user and you can solve that brief without too much penalty to the other users. This is what I meant with holistic. The biggest restriction is the lift fan solution. It's dead weight in normal flight and I think the Air Force presently has little use for a VTOL/STOVL aircraft when they have big smooth runways if that's all you could use it for.

[GScholz]

Just for you Shida - British Aerospace test pilot's perspective: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kshe7-BYfWc

(Love the score by Two Steps From Hell)

[soda72]

I always loved the A-10,  at the NTC they would always find our battery and rape us every time.   I was glad to know they would be on our side in a time of conflict. 

But if I was on the ground today and someone gave me a choice of a A-10, F-35, or a drone to watch over my area for close air support.

I would choose the drone. 

[GScholz]

Personally I'd prefer the AC-130, but I might just be weird.

[Tupac]

Can't get any stealthier than being grounded at your base. Well played Lockheed, on creating the stealthiest plane in the world.