My friend from high school who is the CO of our test fighter squadron now was down at the F35 training center learning to fly it before our election up here last year, and the new gov fully pulling the plug on the F35. There is a competition going on right now (of sorts, it's more of a paper comp than anything), and from what he's told me, the F35 is actually winning it, even though the gov has been squawking that it'll buy a few squadrons of Superhornets to "tide us over", which in their language means "we'll go from 144 Hornets down to 36 Supers, and call it a day most likely". I know that our training squadron for fighters, the 410, would have been eliminated mostly as all of our pilots would be trained in the USA at the F35 training center there, a HUGE advantage for allied air forces IMO in terms of cost. That way the 65 F35s we were going to buy would ALL be combat coded, or at least the vast majority, instead of having a huge amount siphoned off for training reqs.
The F35C is undergoing trials right now out on a CVN, watching the YT vids of this - pretty impressive. Say what you want about other F35 issues, but what it's done for naval aviation in terms of simplifying carrier landings and ops, can't be denied. If nothing else, the future F18 replacement will likely get this tech, as would any future naval strike fighter, making night/bad weather landings so much more accurate and simple for our guys.
Another article about the F35C ground testing that went on before the squadron deployed to the CVN. Good point in the vid below - 200+ F35s of all 3 models are flying, and have flown 60,000 hours, without a prototype crashing. The F22, F117, F18, F15, F16, so many others can't make that claim. Yes one had a fire on the ground, but it didn't crash.
Before seven of the Navy’s carrier-variant F-35 Joint Strike Fighters embarked aboard the carrier USS George Washington for a third and final round of developmental testing, they completed a required ashore training period, practicing landings at Choctaw Naval Outlying Field near Pensacola, Florida.
The landings went well — maybe a little too well.
“They were landing in the same spot on the runway every time, tearing up where the hook touches down,” Vice Adm. Mike Shoemaker, head of Naval Air Forces, told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. “So we quickly realized, we needed to either fix the runway or adjust, put some variants in the system. So that’s how precise this new system is.”
U.S. Navy photo by Dane Wiedmann
U.S. Navy photo by Dane Wiedmann
The new system in question is called Delta Flight Path, a built-in F-35C technology that controls glide slope and minimizes the number of variables pilots must monitor as they complete arrested carrier landings. A parallel system known as MAGIC CARPET, short for Maritime Augmented Guidance with Integrated Controls for Carrier Approach and Recovery Precision Enabling Technologies, is being developed for use with the Navy’s F/A-18 E/F Super Hornets and EA-18G Growlers. Together, these systems may allow carriers to operate with fewer tankers, leaving more room for other aircraft, Shoemaker said.
Military.com reported on the implications of this new landing technology from the carrier George Washington earlier this week, as the first operational pilot-instructors with Strike Fighter Squadron 101, out of Oceana, Virginia, began daytime carrier qualifications on the aircraft. On Thursday, Shoemaker had an update on the ongoing carrier tests.
Of about 100 F-35C arrested landings were completed on the carrier, he said, 80 percent engaged the No. 3 wire, meaning the aircraft had touched down at the ideal spot. As of Monday, there had been zero so-called bolters, when the aircraft misses an arresting wire and must circle the carrier for another attempt.
“I think that’s going to give us the ability to look at the way we work up and expand the number of sorties. I think it will change the way we operate around the ship … in terms of the number of tankers you have to have up, daytime and nighttime,” he said. “I think that will give us a lot of flexibility in the air wing in the way we use those strike fighters.”
Tankers, or in-air refueling aircraft, must be ready when aircraft make arrested landings in case they run low on fuel during landing attempts. Fewer bolters, therefore, means a reduced tanker requirement.
“Right now, we configure maybe six to eight tankers aboard the ship,” Shoemaker said. “I don’t think we need … that many. That will give us flexibility on our strike fighter numbers, increase the Growler numbers, which I know we’re going to do, and probably E-2D [Advanced Hawkeye carrier-launched radar aircraft] as well.”
The F-35C’s last developmental testing phase is set to wrap up Aug. 23. MAGIC CARPET is expected to be introduced to the fleet in 2019, officials have said.
http://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/navy-f-35c-landed-so-precisely-it-tore-up-a-runway
