I think the F-35 isn't real, that all the videos of it are CGI, and that all these reports are supposed to convince us that this money has been lost, all while the government is secretly using the entire F-35 budget to build a flock of flying drones, walking and talking robots, and rail guns for the next major war.
I have to believe such contrivances to avoid thinking about how my tax dollars are wasted.
I have my picture taken next to an F-35 thanks to a friend who is an F-35 pilot. I can assure you that it's fake. Most likely made of paper mache. The helmet's pretty cool though.
As a former F/A-18 pilot, I’m actually a huge fan of drones, but I’m also suspect of betting everything on them. It strikes me as having the same problem as the JSF: ‘all your eggs in one basket’. If one key flaw can be found with the JSF, a sneaky way to target it, the results would be catastrophic. The same applies to drones, if an adversary can figure out how to deny the comm links or compromise the system, the results would also be catastrophic.
Fighter aircraft are essentially missile trucks with targeting systems. The battle is being won or lost in the electromagnetic spectrum. In this battle, I’m of the mindset that we should have a mix of manned and un-manned missile truck drivers. There are advantages and disadvantages to both systems.
The US Navy has said the F-35 is probably that last manned fighter for them. The X-47B is done after the refuel testing so it makes one wonder what is the next test aircraft.
The Navy is already running a big competition for their carrier based unmanned vehicle (UCLASS)[1]. This competition is part of the reason why, I think, there have been regular press releases coming out from Boeing, Northop, et al. and the Navy regarding drone capabilities - carrier landings, mid-air refueling, etc.
No, the USN has said the F-35 will be the last manned "strike" aircraft for them. They are developing the F/Axx to replace the F-18, and this will definitely be manned.
Yes, I should have added strike fighter, but the F/Axx is listed as manned or unmanned. I have my doubts about the duality they think they are going to get. On the technical side the F-35 is replacing the F/A-18C while the F/Axx is replacing the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet.
The problem for the USN is that the F-35 isn't coming along fast enough, and the cost will make the airwing even smaller than currently deployed. I think they Navy would love to ditch the F-35, let the Marines suffer with the F-35B, and push on to F/Axx. Of course the really smart thing would be pushing UCLASS hard, but that would conflict with a lot of their ideas about piloted aircraft.
Considering we (and around the world) still fly jets from the 1970's and prior (although heavily updated) I'd say we have a handful of decades of human operation left.
To some extent however most of the changes since the 60's have been evolutionary rather than revolutionary, pilotless aircraft are revolutionary.
Even putting modern electronics into an ancient design like the Mig-21 produces a very capable aircraft (the Mig-21 Bison has held it's own against F16's and even F15C's) putting a pilotless control system into something like a modern F15 would create one hell of a fighter.
Inserting a "pilotless control system" into a previously manned fighter does nothing to improve its performance, and degrades it in many ways (i.e. situational awareness). Where unmanned systems do better is in size and weight since they don't have to carry all the gear to support a human. Although you can remove ejection seats, oxygen gear etc from a manned fighter, unmanned really needs to be designed from the ground up.
Interesting that you mention the bison upgrade. The U.S. defense establishment’s inability to iterate quickly with technology is becoming an increasing liability. More, cheaper planes, with specialized roles, that can be upgraded quickly with new technology is definitely the way to go. The JSF is a disaster waiting to happen. As the saying goes, ‘armchair generals study strategy, but professionals study logistics’ forgets the last part that only fools put all their eggs in one basket.
Agreed, also the Bison is interesting because the Russian's put their state of the art (which might not be the wests, I'm not sure) equipment into a plane that first flew 59 years ago and went into service 56 years ago.
That it turned out to be extremely capable is very interesting and compared to the stuff the west is building very cheap.
As I think Lenin said "Quantity has a quality all of it's own".
An RC F-15 exists and is used for training I believe (no link handy) however I think moving forward, it would be more reasonable to expect them to make an RC/autonomous F-35 or F-22 or comparable fifth generation fighter.
They'd certainly be the start platform but without the human in the cockpit you can do stuff you simply can't do now like push the G-envelope right out, modern planes are often computer limited to the G's to prevent injuring the pilot.
If you know you aren't going to exceed 9G you don't design the airframe for more than that, if you know the pilot is going to be a computer then you can push that out way more.
You can also make them much smaller (removing the human, his seat, the redundant controls, environmental control) and somewhat more stealthy.
Quite frankly they'd be terrifying as a weapons platform, they'd re-write the rules of air warfare and I suspect they'd be used a lot more than normal piloted planes because no risk of body bags on the evening news :|.
The plane flies; but I wonder what we're doing putting humans in an airplane at all at this point. The amount of additional engineering that has to be done to support a human in the cockpit is crazy -- life support systems, multiple redundant flight control systems, etc. All of these have maintenance schedules, checklists and protocols that make them very expensive to operate. By the time this weapons system is operational, it will be obsolete.
I would maybe understand if the goal of this program was to produce a weapons system that was a great leap forward in performance, but the F-35 was never designed to be that. It was supposed to remove the need for 3 or 4 different specialized aircraft by creating a general-purpose platform that can serve in multiple roles. It's essentially a cost-reduction program that basically fails at reducing costs because of the additional overhead some of the requirements brought.
In its current iteration, it doesn't do that, and having a single-engine fighter jet is a colossally stupid idea. In the event of engine failure, the pilot has no choice but to eject because fighters are far less aerodynamically stable than passenger planes, and with no engine power, the plane wouldn't be controllable. You don't have these problems in two-engine fighters -- if one engine goes out, you can still limp back to base and land the plane. So your single engine has to be that much more powerful and reliable, which leads to an engine that is more expensive to buy and that needs to be maintained more often. So they ultimately fail in reducing cost and complexity.
For the roles the F-35 will be appropriate for by the time it's finished, drones will be a much better option. The F-35 is explicitly not an air superiority fighter (a role human pilots are still better suited for, and for which the F-22 is a far superior aircraft), and most of the ground support and reconnaissance roles the F-35 is supposed to play are already handled by drones today.
The program only exists because big defense programs are parceled out to congressional districts, whose representatives are loathe to lose the jobs. I don't think the military even wants it that badly at this point.
A human pilot can't be simply disconnected of reprogrammed to turn around and bomb Washington. I think that's a major consideration.
Yes, there are drones that work quite well against countries like Afghanistan but good luck using these against China or Russia. (not that I'd want to see that ever happen)
Drones, like any other aircraft, would be used only after air superiority has been established.
That means that by the time we're sending drones in, the enemy doesn't even have sufficient radar capabilities to know what planes are there. Radar sites are one of the first targets in the process of establishing air superiority because they direct anti-aircraft defenses. They wouldn't even know there are drones to hack, just that missiles are raining down from above.
If we haven't established air superiority yet, we just use cruise missiles. But a cruise missile looks a lot like a missile fired from a drone if you're standing on the ground.
Well, to be fair, a human pilot can decide to do those things on their own. Plus, most drones I'm aware of still have a human pilot, just not on board.
The F-35 started life in 1996 with the Joint Strike Fighter Program. That's almost 2 decades ago, and long before the idea of using drones instead of humans was feasible.
That doesn't mean that the F35 program shouldn't be scrapped and the useful technology used elsewhere but the program goals were reasonable when they started. Or at least not completely ridiculous... I personally think it's a bad idea to have one type of aircraft for everything because if anything happens to cause the fleet to be grounded there is nothing else to step in to fill the gap.
... For an enemy that doesn't exist in a war that won't happen...
PS - Before people yell "China," China's air power isn't even on par with what the US currently has. Their only remotely threatening aircraft is a bad clone of the F-35.
There is a very illuminating video on Youtube by designer of F-16 and A-10 about F-35. Please remember F-22 is a very expensive plane and great for Air superiority, but you need planes in other roles. The Airforce in their sexy trip are trying to replace the reliable A-10 with the F-35. F-35 for ground support, bad bad bad idea, but the guys in Airforce have careers and they will have to move the needle, if you think about it, the military bureaucracy is its own worst enemy.
It's kind of amusing that the one Air Force in the world that has the most means to have different super-specialized planes for every use case has decided to sink a historic amount of money into an all-purpose plane that's not particularly good at one task. You would understand if a place like Panama decided "We can only afford 6 fighter jets and one maintenance team/infrastructure, so let's get F-35s because they'll cover multiple needs", but these are absolutely not the constraints of the United States.
We had a specialized plane, the F22- but it cost $150M each and people thought "that's crazy" so they said: let's save money by building a new plane in bulk that can be customized for each branch! So while the costs upfront were/are high, in the end once we start stamping them out in bulk the price per place will be much lower.
And here we are. Intentions were good, execution has been bad.
Oh no, the Sea Wolf works, but is too expensive at $2B/boat! Let's scrap the working program, use "lessons learned" to build a cheaper attack submarine. Years of delays and cost overruns follow, and we get the inferior Virginia class, at a bargain-basement price of $3B.
Oh no, the F22 works, but is too expensive at $150M/plane! (Would have been less over time, but who's counting?) Let's scrap the working program, use "lessons learned" to build a cheaper fighter. Years of delays and cost overruns follow, no working plane in sight, but if it ever flies, we will get the inferior F35, at a bargain-basement price of $350M/plane.
I can't wait to see what happens when the Ohio-class replacement program starts for real. Also can't wait to see what happens when healthcare is fully nationalized — I'm sure the bureaucracy in charge will be so much sleeker and more efficient than the Pentagon, and special interests so much less influential in Congress. Oh, wait: annual US military spending is about $750B, and healthcare adds up to $3.5T.
UAVs are the future. They are more affordable, they can be stealther, they can be smaller, they can stay flying for longer, and they require less ground support.
I can not believe the F-35 hasn't been completely cancelled yet. Every partner of the US doesn't really want these expensive beasts.
Procurement is often not about warfighting but about politics. That's why they split construction up among multiple locations -- that's multiple congressmen who have a vested incentive in seeing that money continue to roll into their district and provide jobs.
It's basically "New Deal"-type spending that is acceptable to the right wing (which, for the most part these days, includes the Democrats). The economy is in shambles, so you have to do something about it. But fixing the economy would involve breaking from your orthodoxy and upsetting your wealthy sponsors. So what do you do? Pay the unemployed to build killing machines, everyone loves those.
It's easy to blame the wealthy sponsors, but some blame also rests on the people who are convinced that literally all of the taxes they pay on their 250%-of-poverty-line income go to support those on 150%-of-poverty-line assistance programs, and that that's a terrible thing, because of someone they met once who got more than they 'deserved' from the system.
There's a whole psychology there which is missed by the usual "blame everything on the rich" reflexes. It's a problem which will have to be addressed if any social reforms are actually going to stick, as opposed to being pissed away in tax cuts and whinging about how much more deserving the poor were back before they could afford to treat two major diseases a lifetime.
Oh I agree with you. But I also think that that attitude is driven, at least partially, by the rich. If you're part of the top N%, for N<50, you must convince other people that what is in your best interest is also in their best interest. This is what has happened, the middle class have been turned against themselves and the poor.
Yes. It sometimes feels like the U.S. Is a social welfare state. Except all the social welfare is given to large military contractors. Humph, I suppose that's what they mean by military industrial complex.
Not trying to justify the F-35, it's a cluster fuck, but manned aircraft will be around for a while. Unless the operator is local, the communication latency for UAVs makes them unsuitable for some types of combat missions.
If you think drones, or autonomous planes will fix what governments spend (and waste) on military projects - you're in for a huge disappointment. If anything, "drone" type weapons have meant an increase in budgets.
While the F-35 budgets looks atrocious now - in a couple decades we'll look back and think "how cheap!".
I remember reading a couple of years ago that the thing causing F-35's biggest delays was software, not the hardware. The software for the radar alone is reported to be a few millions of lines of C++ code.
An article on the topic. The summary, IMO, is that no one acquiring major systems (defense or otherwise) seems to properly understand the costs and risks of software. More money spent up front on their design, development and test framework would have significantly reduced the risks while (naturally) costing more early on, but should reduce costs over the lifetime. They ignore this and spend more after the deadlines have passed as a consequence.
I was thinking mostly about air-to-air combat. Other missions (recon, bombing, ground support, refueling, etc.) can or are done with UAVs now. But on thinking about it further, the UAVs of tomorrow can be much faster and more maneuverable than any manned fighter aircraft once you remove the requirement of keeping the pilot alive. I don't know that it could be done today, but I imagine in the not-to-distant future we'll have effective air-to-air UAVs.
Every air force in the world wants these expensive beasts, it's the entire identity of the service - TOP GUN knights of old jousting for supremacy. The command structure of most air forces comes from the fighter pilots, it's a common complaint in USAF that transport, which is maybe the most useful day to day function, is a career dead-end.
Nobody in the military will take seriously a "warrior" that runs a joystick on a RPV, and when these things gain more autonomy it's going to eliminate the necessity for whole ranks of command. So the Air Force will fight to the bitter end for these things, long after they are will be effective solely as air show entertainment.
> Every air force in the world wants these expensive beasts, it's the entire identity of the service - TOP GUN knights of old jousting for supremacy.
I agree that these are shiny new tools for the airforce and its pilots. Here in Canada it has been a public shitstorm of rapidly increasing procurement costs and quality issues.
Canada has officially delayed purchasing F-35 for the foreseeable future:
A large part of the criticism was around whether a single engine jet was really appropriate for patrolling the Canadian Arctic. I imagine that rhetoric is going to get ramped up as reports of that single engine being unreliable surface.
F-35 tries doing so many things and fails in almost all of them. The complexity of engine given the whole STOVL based frame and design is the culprit here. One plane to rule them all is still a bad idea, given the complexity of these machines. There are many lessons for any kind of system design and development in this whole story.
I realize "mean time between failures" doesn't mean what I think it means, but holy moley. The engine can only go 25 hours between failures instead of the 120 they're aiming for? That's a pretty big gap in performance and I wouldn't want to be flying one of these things.
"As of late December, engines on the Marine Corps’ complex version of the F-35, designed for short takeoffs and vertical landings, flew about 47 hours between failures caused by engine design issues instead of the 90 hours planned for this point, according to GAO officials. Air Force and Navy model engines flew about 25 hours between failures instead of the 120 hours planned."
An engine for a military application has very different characteristics from that of a commercial passenger plane. The MTBF for the latter is in the 100k+ hours, with servicing usually performed around 10k.
Usually, older aircraft that are being phased out are mothballed shortly before their next heavy maintenance check. And the resale value of used aircraft, especially older ones, is heavily influenced by how soon the next D check is.
MTBF generally doesn't imply that the engine is either inoperable or completely failed. MTBCF, MTTF, or other metrics measure that.
The MTBF for a military aircraft as a whole system in general would likely be pretty low since it's composed of so many systems. In essence, something is likely degraded on the aircraft at any given time. That is why there are dual redundancies and easily swappable units.
Why use the mean and not the median? I would think that the likelihood of something failing is much higher during the first few hours than once it has been flying for a 100 hours.
I was about to point out the same thing. I left shortly before the program got cut. Everyone saw the writing on the wall.
I remember some talk about it being more about politics than saving money. I can't remember what politician it was, but they were one of the big pushers of closing down GE's alternative engine program, which was convenient since they were from Connecticut where Pratt & Whitney is located (If I remember correctly).
Basically they wanted their state to benefit exclusively.
Not to say GE's engine would be in much better shape right now either. I am really not sure what the right decision would have been.
From what I understand, the F-35 is trying to be a single airframe that functions as both an air superiority fighter and ground support. Designed around things like vertical landing and short takeoff, which are frequently unnecessary and add complexity and design compromises elsewhere. And as far as actually being ground support, it's not an A-10. It's behind schedule and over budget. And there's the debate over what war this plane would be useful in (having a stick to wave at Russia?), because it's certainly not the kind of war we've been seeing recently.
There are a lot of better things we could do with my tax dollars. Like having a slightly less enormous national debt, if nothing else. Or having slightly more solvent social security so I can retire before I croak.
They are already planning on using more advanced adaptive engine technology from the ADVENT program for future F-35 engines, since the program is going to last for quite a long time.
This could be related to campaigning against the current F135 engine.
I have to believe such contrivances to avoid thinking about how my tax dollars are wasted.