F-35 News and discussion (2016) take III

Of course not.

Did you notice the word “theoretically”?

Of course I did but “theoretically” anyone who even suggests such a thing should be hung, drawn and quartered! 😉

The Harrier never VIFF’d in combat or in combat training. It was a “paper” capability.

Anyway, since the lifting nozzle were not activated in horizontal flight, that would have been difficult. I don’t see how this would have been practical.

No, no and no… There will be no modifying of either of the “floating devices” for a catapult!

Of course not.

Did you notice the word “theoretically”?

Well, theoretically they could still make a switch to the Rafale! Of course not quite in the same league as the F-35, and I guess it would require a) a major political re-alignment and b) a small rebuild of the “floating devices”, but OToH the Rafale can carry more and further than the B and its tiny stomach. And even without “VLO” it is still very dangerous opponent, and will remain so for at least the next 30 years (assuming the opponent does not have US made gear).

No, no and no… There will be no modifying of either of the “floating devices” for a catapult!

The alternatives for the RAF/RN (you are British, right?) right now are “Zero/nada/nyet” if they want to use those two big 65000 tons floating devices that are being built.

Cheers

Well, theoretically they could still make a switch to the Rafale! Of course not quite in the same league as the F-35, and I guess it would require a) a major political re-alignment and b) a small rebuild of the “floating devices”, but OToH the Rafale can carry more and further than the B and its tiny stomach. And even without “VLO” it is still very dangerous opponent, and will remain so for at least the next 30 years (assuming the opponent does not have US made gear).

The Harrier never VIFF’d in combat or in combat training. It was a “paper” capability.

Makes you wonder had the X/F-32 ever entered service would it have ever been capable of doing the Harriers party trick of VIFF (Vectoring In Forward Flight)?

The lift nozzles provided vast majority of the thrust.

FIFY and good catch. The other 6 nozzles are primarily to balance the jet on the lift nozzles.

Hi All,
FBW & Sintra,
While I know next to nothing about how far the programme has advanced in the as you say 16 years since the competition was won all I can se and comment on was the documentary and if I am not mistaken the F-35 has suffered just as the Harriers have with in-gestation of hot gas. I am certain had the Boeing team been given adequate time they would have solved the problem.

Am wrong saying that the F-35 has been proven an easy target to other apposing aircraft ? Has it not already been out manoeuvred by current
generation fighter on exercise ? As far as I am aware the Delta wing shape means it can manoeuvre better than other wing layouts
(Please correct if wrong) so it would have been able to in my eyes been in abetter position to defend itself.

While the looks are reminiscent of Jimmy Hills chin did that not help with wing being thick for a better fuel capacity as well as weapons storage ? I appreciate that while I have nowhere near the knowledge of many on here concerning the F-35 project such as both yourself it appears to me that if you design an aircraft on a set budget and do not meet that budget then you incur he penalties or get turfed off the project which has not been done.

The project in my and many others is simply too costly and still the aircraft is plagued by problems, the one I mentioned above being able to defend itself I would have thought a must if it is a multirole and one of those roles is as a fighter then it has failed hasn’t it ? I understand that development costs can make aircraft lag behind projected figures across the board but to me it feels like your trying to fill a bucket with water when the bucket has no bottom.

I agree that the single piece wing for the Delta version was a pain and by the end of the documentary they had revised the design to include horizontal stabilisers I suppose at the end of the day both teams running before they could walk but like I said I am sure these flaws would have been solved but I don’t agree they would have cost as much that has been pumped into the F-35 programme.

While you say that there are 200 aircraft already completed how many of them will be recalled for faults ? add to that that some are now cancelling or downgrading their requirement because the increase in cost of each unit. Just look at the state the RN is in now concerning the programme not getting as many as they wanted on top of that having US aircraft and personnel on board what a complete shambles and I fear rather than getting better it will only get worse.

I would like nothing more than the programme to be a complete success but in all honesty it is the opposite again it all comes down to the money IMHO.

Geoff.

1batfastard

FBW has already covered the topic, i´ll simply had two points:

a) the X-32 died sixteen years ago, the team behind it was disbanded, a great big chunk will have already retired, some major systems that would have been in that aircraft are out of production, namely the engine (the F119), others have found their way into the SH (namely a great big chunk of what would be the Radar ended in today´s AN/APG-79), but the entire program is dead, entirely, terminaly and for a very, very, very long time, if its a Boeing fighter its either a SH, Eagle or an entirely new design
b) the JSF program has had a very troubled life and yes, its not cheap, yes, its bloody late, yes, its flight performance is not the equivalent of a Raptor, it seems that the program team learned the wrong lessons with the EFA and ATF programs… but hell, in 1998 most neutral observers were stating the obvious, a STVOL, Stealth, Supersonic, mach 1.6/1.8 strike fighter with the weight of a Phantom would not be cheap and it would be hellish to develop, they were right, but, and this is the main point, its finaly here, the costs are (more or less) finaly controled, its starting to deliver, at this point might has well ramp the production, lower the production costs and deliver two thousand of the ******s… Unless the Pentagon orders two or three hundred of new build Raptors with an ungodly number of extra SH´s, and this is not gonna happen.

And if someone starts with “Chinese Flankers are gonna club it like baby seals”, yeah, off course they will… mach 1.6, 9g, LO airframe, cutting edge avionics and hundreds of them… some “baby seal´s” there…

The alternatives for the RAF/RN (you are British, right?) right now are “Zero/nada/nyet” if they want to use those two big 65000 tons floating devices that are being built.

Cheers

Well, that was a major error on my part.

I always thought the 2D TVC SERN nozzle rotated down to provide thrust for vertical takeoffs. Watching it again on youtube 15 years later. I forgot the nozzle does not!

Edit- eagle already caught it. The lift nozzles provided much of the thrust.
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Seeing as the swivelling nozzles are actually called lift nozzles and are located at the centre of the aircraft, I guess they provided most of the thrust.

I said “relatively cold” meaning cold when compared to temperature of a PC.

Ingestion of these gases was a problem, yes, and I never said it wasn’t, simple, the exhaust from the engine without PC is necessarily colder than with PC, and it is spread between several nozzles (not vanes, sorry) rather than a single large blowtorch of the F-35

The rear nozzle of the X-32 was a single “torch” and the forward nozzles were of the same temp as the rear. No such thing as “relatively cold” as the forward nozzles wer not only the same temp, but had to actually provide more thrust than the rear nozzle as they were much closer to the CoG than the rear nozzle.

“Hi All,
Sorry to put the cat amongst the pigeons with this thread post, but I recently re-watched the battle of the x-planes documentary on the PBS channel. The reason why the X-35 was chosen ahead of the Boeing X-32 was down to better value. Can this aircraft still be considered best value considering the overrun in budget,development and the escalating cost per aircraft the partners are now it seems more often to stump up ?”

Because F35 is on the verge of entering service. It would be ridiculous to cancel it at this point, and restart a program that would need huge sums of money ploughing into it.

Trump wasn’t serious about changing to an F18 order, he was making a point to Lockheed Martin, and it seems to have worked. For too long now these major defence contractors have been complacent in the fact that they can just turn around and ask for more money, and most likely get it.

I said “relatively cold” meaning cold when compared to temperature of a PC.

Ingestion of these gases was a problem, yes, and I never said it wasn’t, simple, the exhaust from the engine without PC is necessarily colder than with PC, and it is spread between several nozzles (not vanes, sorry) rather than a single large blowtorch of the F-35

The X-32 had a SERN nozzle. The exaust gases would have been concentrated in a smaller, flatter plume. The two lift nozzles would have been blowing hot air (hot compared to the RR lift fan). The roll posts would have used thrust from the combustion chamber channeled through the wings.

There is no doubt the thermal issues would have been worse. Instead of one large blowtorch and a cooling fan, there would have been one (equally large) blowtorch concentrated on a smaller surface area with several complementary blowtorches.

By comparison with what you are proposing, restarting from zero the entire JSF saga, today´s F-35A/B/C are “peanuts” in acquisition costs.

What you are actually proposing is picking a program that lost a competition SIXTEEN years ago, drop the entire JSF program, the one who costed around sixty billions in the SDD phase and start all over again, this time by Boeing… Lets just burn another sixty billion dollars and wait another decade to a decade and a half for the delivery of the first airframes…

Chances are that the Pentagon doesnt have the money to develop an entire new aircraft while re building their entire Fast Jet TAC Air in order to have their Vipers and Hornets flying for the next five decades.

So in short; F-35 program is too big to fail.
And that was the reality like for 8 years ago, no matter how badly mishandled it has been. Concurrentcy or not, this should have been forseen.
God bless the Military Industrial Complex D.W. Eisen warned us about 50 years ago 😉

You know, I have read a lot of Flack towards the way Russian Federation over sufficate its state owned huge company like Sukhoi etc..
But guess what! It works both ways;
The Putin State: – Here is how much funding you get for Pak-FA program.
Sukhoi goes;
-Right.. but will take us longer time sinse we do not get to increase our R&D portfolie due to our limited funding!

Putin State goes:
– Who cares, you will make due with what you get, Dawai!?

And who wins? Perhaps not VKS. But surly the tax payers do.

I said “relatively cold” meaning cold when compared to temperature of a PC.

Ingestion of these gases was a problem, yes, and I never said it wasn’t, simple, the exhaust from the engine without PC is necessarily colder than with PC, and it is spread between several nozzles (not vanes, sorry) rather than a single large blowtorch of the F-35

um… The X-32’s forward lift nozzles used hot gases, not cold gases. This is the reason why it had compressor stalls… ie ‘hot gas” ingestion. It did havea “jet screen” (see pic below) that attempted to keep the hot gas from coming forward, but as we saw during the tests, this was not enough.

Also, the X-32’s rear nozzle is the same “blowtorch” as the F-35’s while also using hot gas in the forward nozzles. This meant that the X-32 directed more heat to the deck than the F-35 did.

The F135 is the most powerful fighter engine in production. I’m not sure if there would have been a solution to the hot gas ingestion issue. What’s worse is that there are thermal issues with the F-35B landing on a LHA/LHD, or an untreated concrete pad. Those would have been worse with the F-32.

er, I beg to differ, the vertical take off of the X-32 was made with relatively “cold” gases… took ahead of the post combustion channel, what’s more, they are spread among different exhaust vanes, not a single “PC-blowtorch” as with the F-35.. now, obviously, they had a problem with the amount of lift produced to carry the thing, but if they’d managed to sort it out, in any case, it wouldn’t produce as much heat without using PC

Hi All,
FBW & Sintra,
While I know next to nothing about how far the programme has advanced in the as you say 16 years since the competition was won all I can se and comment on was the documentary and if I am not mistaken the F-35 has suffered just as the Harriers have with in-gestation of hot gas. I am certain had the Boeing team been given adequate time they would have solved the problem.

The F135 is the most powerful fighter engine in production. I’m not sure if there would have been a solution to the hot gas ingestion issue. What’s worse is that there are thermal issues with the F-35B landing on a LHA/LHD, or an untreated concrete pad. Those would have been worse with the F-32.

Am wrong saying that the F-35 has been proven an easy target to other apposing aircraft ? Has it not already been out manoeuvred by current generation fighter on exercise ?

There has been little feedback on it’s manuverability during exercises it has participated in. There is the http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2016/08/operational-assessment-of-the-f-35a-argues-for-full-program-procurement-and-concurrent-development-process
report polling pilots opinions of the F-35 compared to thier former aircraft. From the pilot comments about the F-35 on recent exercises, the F-35 has performed as expected. By that, they have stressed the dominance of the F-35 in situational awareness, and as a force multiplier. There are some anecdotes about F-35’s going undefeated vs. this or that. In reality, they are just training exercises and the operators have barely scratched the surface on integrating the F-35 into the force.

What you are referring to is a leaked test pilot report. The report was a look at the CLAWS (control laws) of the F-35. The target aircraft was an F-16D and the F-35 was fitted with a rudimentary HUD and was sent through a series of set ups to test controllability, recovery, anti-spin logic especially at high AoA. The report was largely negative as the pilot decribed the control laws as over dampened and slow to respond to pitch and yaw control imputs. This became the “F-35 can’t dogfight” headline of “War is Boring”. L-M had stated previously that the control laws may have be too restrictive due to early TRO, wing drop issue expected on the “c” variant.

Edit- Having read flight test reports, they are supposed to critical. I read one flight test from the 1970’s on the F-15 buffeting at high AoA. You would have thought the F-15 was dangerous and uncontrollable due to the severe buffet reported in the test report. As it turns out, this is a characteristic of twin tailed fighters at higher angles of attack.

As far as I am aware the Delta wing shape means it can manoeuvre better than other wing layouts
(Please correct if wrong) so it would have been able to in my eyes been in abetter position to defend itself.

No, every wing layout has different advantages and disadvantages. The U.S. favors the trapezoidal wing.

The project in my and many others is simply too costly and still the aircraft is plagued by problems, the one I mentioned above being able to defend itself I would have thought a must if it is a multirole and one of those roles is as a fighter then it has failed hasn’t it ? I understand that development costs can make aircraft lag behind projected figures across the board but to me it feels like your trying to fill a bucket with water when the bucket has no bottom.

It has had a rocky history, there is no doubt about that. Public perception of the F-35 program has lagged behind reality throughout it’s history. When the program was in serious trouble circa 2008-2010, there were many media voices advocating the killing of the F-22 for the more “affordable” F-35. We are now in the opposite cycle, many of the early issues are still dredged up in news about the F-35 having long since been corrected. Like all major U.S. weapon systems: Los Angeles class, M1 tank, F-15, AMRAAM, the gestation was long and painful. There were serious cost overruns and while the end result may not be quite as envisioned, it is a da@n sight better than public perception would believe.

While you say that there are 200 aircraft already completed how many of them will be recalled for faults ? add to that that some are now cancelling or downgrading their requirement because the increase in cost of each unit. Just look at the state the RN is in now concerning the programme not getting as many as they wanted on top of that having US aircraft and personnel on board what a complete shambles and I fear rather than getting better it will only get worse.

No, concurrency is not a recall, there are engineering fixes that have been applied as the program progressed. Concurrency is due to run it’s course in the next year or two. The technology refresh approach to the avionics system ensures that the majority of early F-35’s will be as capable as new build (opposed to the Typhoon tranche 1 issues).

Hi All,
FBW & Sintra,
While I know next to nothing about how far the programme has advanced in the as you say 16 years since the competition was won all I can se and comment on was the documentary and if I am not mistaken the F-35 has suffered just as the Harriers have with in-gestation of hot gas. I am certain had the Boeing team been given adequate time they would have solved the problem.

Am wrong saying that the F-35 has been proven an easy target to other apposing aircraft ? Has it not already been out manoeuvred by current
generation fighter on exercise ? As far as I am aware the Delta wing shape means it can manoeuvre better than other wing layouts
(Please correct if wrong) so it would have been able to in my eyes been in abetter position to defend itself.

While the looks are reminiscent of Jimmy Hills chin did that not help with wing being thick for a better fuel capacity as well as weapons storage ? I appreciate that while I have nowhere near the knowledge of many on here concerning the F-35 project such as both yourself it appears to me that if you design an aircraft on a set budget and do not meet that budget then you incur he penalties or get turfed off the project which has not been done.

The project in my and many others is simply too costly and still the aircraft is plagued by problems, the one I mentioned above being able to defend itself I would have thought a must if it is a multirole and one of those roles is as a fighter then it has failed hasn’t it ? I understand that development costs can make aircraft lag behind projected figures across the board but to me it feels like your trying to fill a bucket with water when the bucket has no bottom.

I agree that the single piece wing for the Delta version was a pain and by the end of the documentary they had revised the design to include horizontal stabilisers I suppose at the end of the day both teams running before they could walk but like I said I am sure these flaws would have been solved but I don’t agree they would have cost as much that has been pumped into the F-35 programme.

While you say that there are 200 aircraft already completed how many of them will be recalled for faults ? add to that that some are now cancelling or downgrading their requirement because the increase in cost of each unit. Just look at the state the RN is in now concerning the programme not getting as many as they wanted on top of that having US aircraft and personnel on board what a complete shambles and I fear rather than getting better it will only get worse.

I would like nothing more than the programme to be a complete success but in all honesty it is the opposite again it all comes down to the money IMHO.

Geoff.