You know whats worse than todays pilots flying ancient airplanes, a brand new extravegantly expensive F-35 that cant match an F-16 or F-15E built in the 80s, planes built for a fraction of the price.

The F-35 might be an OK successor to the F-117 as a mostly stealth small bomber, but all indications are its completely worthless in a close in dogfight, you just have to read the leaked report from a recent test against an ancient F-16.

The F-35 simply doesnt have enough power, cant turn fast enough and bleeds off to much energy. The pilot found one manuever he could use to shake the F-16 but it consumed so much energy he had to run away and try to get the energy back.

The F-35 will also be horrible in the close air support role at which the A-10 excels, again at an even smaller fraction of the price tag.

F-35 is a classic jack of all trades and master of none.

There might have been a place for a few hundred of them but for the U.S. and every allied air force to think they are going to use one horrible design to replace every fighter they have is complete insanity. If it ever reaches full deployment, one accident or problem and the entire western world will have no air force. At least the Navy has the sense to keep the F-18 alive.

The F-35 is a tribute to the extent Lockheed has seized total control of Congress and the Pentagon, they could literally sell the Air Force actual turkeys for a hundred million a pop and get away with it.

Those B-52â(TM)s still flying today is because Northrop, has also seized control of the Air Forces generals made the B-2 so expensive and so few in number the Air Force canâ(TM)t afford to risk it in combat.

Besides the U.S. has been fighting people living in mud huts who have no air force and air defenses for over a decade, B-52â(TM)s and A-10â(TM)s work incredibly well in that role.

Well, you have to factor in the Iranian cultural mania for disagreeing with each other. The Shah couldn't keep them under his thumb, neither can the mullahs, who have their hands full disagreeing with each other.

From a tyrant's perspective Iran is ungovernable, which doesn't mean elements in the government don't give tyranny a go on a regular basis. It's an ideal setup for producing martyrs. The futility of cracking down means you have a little space to rake some muck before official anger overcomes reason.

A drone.

It sounds crazy because that isn't the whole story.

The F-35 comes in three variants, A for Air Force, B for Marines, and C for Navy. They are all variations on the same theme. The A is the base model. The B is pretty much the same as A but swaps out one of it's fuel tanks for a lift fan. The C is bigger version of A with folding wings, bigger wings are needed to have lower take off and landing speeds for carriers. Sharing a common platform save megabucks on all the radars, radios, FLIRs, fancy electronics, and the massive amount of software that needs to be written. It also gives them all a common engine, cockpit, and ejection system, which makes keeping spares on hand easier.

The F-35B replaces the Harrier because the Harrier is ancient and being better than it is a low bar to meet.

The F-35A replaces the F-16 by having stealth and a useful range. The F-16 was designed as a point defence fighter to defend against the Soviets over Germany, short range meant that it could be small, light, and manoeuvrable. Here are the typical combat ranges for the various fighters: F15C: 1,967 km, F-35A: 1,135 km, F-22: 760 km, F-18: 740 km, F-16: 550 km. The secret to the F-16's manoeuvrability is that they ditched a lot of fuel weight. The problem is the Soviet Union collapsed and the point defence mission disappeared. The F-16 found a new lease on life when the strapped an external fuel tank and targeting pod on it to give it enough range to be a bomb truck, but the extra weight of that fuel makes it shit for manoeuvrability. So the F-16 can either have range and shit manoeuvrability, or great manoeuvrability and a useless range. The F-35A has both, plus stealth, plus better infrared/optical sensors so it doesn't need a targeting pod.

The F-18A/C has the same problems as the F-16. So it is being replaced by two fighters, the F-18E/F Super Hornet for air superiority, and the F-35C for attack missions.

The A-10 is basically a plane without a mission. It was designed in the days before precision weapons when the only way to hit tanks was to strafe them WWII style. That means low and slow, which means it needed to be armoured against AA. Great, except the Soviets simply upped the AA from 23mm to 30mm, introduced their version of the Stinger called Igla, and added more armour to the roof of their tanks. By the late 80s the A-10 was a death trap, fly low and Soviet AA will kill it, fly medium and Igla will kill it, fly at normal hight and you can't aim. And even if you could aim it's questionable if the GAU could still disable most recent Soviet tanks. The final nail in the coffin is the Soviet Union collapsing. There are no hordes of tanks for the A-10 to kill so what good is it? Against even a moderate air defence network it can't survive, which is why it had to be pulled off attacks against Republican Guard in the Second Gulf War, too many were shot down. Against a unsophisticated enemy like an insurgency it is too expensive, if the enemy can't shoot you down send a drone. The done is more accurate, cheaper, longer loiter time, and can provide video feeds to ground commanders. During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq the A-10 only provided something like 18% of the CAS missions, far less than the F-16s or F-18s. The USAF used the A-10s because they have them, but they don't want them.

The F-35 can replace all of those planes because one was hopelessly out dated. One had already lost its mission to the remaining two. The final two work okay, so the F-35 was designed as a upgraded version of them with better range, better sensors, and stealth.

Well, alright, lets take close air support in Afghanistan. What would have been the cheaper, easier-to-maintain solution with better time on station?

I distinctly remember it being promised that the F-35 would beat anything but an F-22 in air-to-air combat, at a fraction of the price. It was not part of the original concept for the system but it was definitely sold politically as being capable of acting as a poor man's F22.

I wonder about the helmet mounted display, whether that's something you'd consider absolutely necessary in an aircraft whose job is to hit surface targets in contested airspace.

To be fair, that was not the original justification for the thing. That was mission creep.

I think the original impetus was to have something stealthy that could do ground strikes in enemy territory. And it makes sense to do a naval version of the same thing. If they'd just focused on that they'd have been done a long time ago with a solid design, which of course in engineering nearly always turns out to be more versatile than you planned for. Adding STOVL and the whizbang helmet (cool as that may be) as necessary elements of the system turned this into an "everything for everyone" project, which almost always turns out less versatile than you hoped.

Sure you can identify scenarios where the A-10 is useless. But in the last twenty years it's been extremely useful in a number scenarios we've actually faced.

The idea that a system ought to play every role in every conceivable situation is why the F35 performs none of them very well. In hindsight the idea of accommodating the Marines' need for a STOVL aircraft in the same basic design probably dictated too many compromises in the plane's other roles.

Oh look, another F-35 hack job by David Axe from War is Boring. Maybe if he wasn't so consistently full of shit, or actually had a source to quote I'd bother to read his blog.

First, it's a strike fighter, why the fuck are people getting so worked up about dog-fighting? You know that these planes are not yet rated for their full flight envelope, or you would if Axe did his job. You would also know that the F-35 has more than twice the range of the F-16. Imagine that, a strike fighter that carrier more weight in fuel than point defence fighter. It's almost like dog-fighting wasn't the primary design goal. You know what else can't dogfight? The A-10 that guys like Axe are always furiously masturbating over.

Second, this isn't the 1970s. Sure dogfights may happen, but a hell of a lot less than BVR attacks and SAMs. And before anyone starts talking about Vietnam, go look at the numbers for that war. The little blurb you got about F-4 Phantom from watching Top Gun is wrong. For every plane lost in a dogfight, two were lost to AA missiles, and five were lost to SAMs, in the fucking 70s. Lord knows the world hasn't had any other conflicts since then from which to draw lessons.

Third, it's the most expensive plane program in history at $1T? No shit, the program is to build and maintain almost 3,000 fighters over 50 years. In fact is "almost" as expensive as the $3T to keep doing what we are doing: pumping out a half dozen different air frames with no common supply chain so that each one can be good at exactly one mission. But if you still think it is too expensive, I have to ask, compared to what? The F-22? Not even close. The Eurofighter? Lol. Russia's latest vaporware? Sure if they ever build more than some prototypes. Some last generation platform with no stealth? Sure that will make a great strike platform against an air defence system in contested air space. The money you save on a "cheap" F-16 Block 60s at $70 million vs an F-35A at ~$85-90 million, won't even cover the cost of all the extra shit you have to attach to it to F-16 to get the same performance.

These endless hack jobs on the F-35 project need to stop. This isn't 2008, we have over 100 of these things flying already. They are a mostly known quantity, and they greatly out perform the systems they are going to replace.

You are confusing "ascension" with "right ascension". Just plain "ascension" (not capitalized) is pretty much a synonym for "ascent".

A few dictionaries define "ascension" as an astronomical term referring to the rising of the star above the horizon -- in other words the increasing of altitude in the alt/azimuth coordinate system -- but this definition doesn't appear in lists of astronomical terms so either this usage is uncommon or obsolete.

Depending on how you measure "success record". The ones that have no failures (Saturn I, Long March 1) would seem to have an unbeatable success record by at least one metric. :)

Oh, well you have a feeling. I guess the scientists can pack up and move on to some other topic then.

First of all, Sir Tim is British, and second of all the First Amendment refers to government regulation of speech. It does not compel a private organization to employ or associate with an individual whose speech it feels reflects poorly on them.

This is not a legal issue, it's a moral issue. It's morally wrong to empower a social media lynch mob without performing a reasonable inquiry into the facts.

I don't claim to know anything beyond what I've read in the news, which of course doesn't qualify me as an expert. But I'm fairly confident the fact that you find the accommodations made to Hawaiian religious beliefs annoying has no bearing on whether those beliefs are sincere.

I agree that there's no way to satisfy some of these people. That doesn't make them liars or bad, it just means their interests in this situation cannot be reconciled with yours. It happens sometimes. As much as I believe in looking for win-win solutions, there are occasionally situations where one side or the other has to lose.

And you won't ever get everyone on the other side to agree because that never happens. There are even Catholics who think the Pope isn't as Catholic as they are. So as soon as there were any questions raised about the religious dimension of this project it became inevitable that if they ever built this thing it would be in the face of protests. And as long as the project's leaders think what they're doing is right they should do it and take their PR lumps on the chin. But imputing, without any evidence, false and hypocritical motivations to the protesters actually undoes the work done to make this project possible. That actually *is* disrespecting native religious beliefs.

Did you read his dissent? It missed a great deal, including the point and coherence.