The China story is odd because the new VHF radar is the JY-27A Skywatch-V – the JY-26 is UHF.

Another observation: a quick search shows that F-22s do not always fly with the reflectors attached. Indeed, the assembly does not look very supersonic-compatible, with a flat front and rear. Whether there are also retractable augmentors is not known.

By the way – how am I supposed to use the gun until the software is ready and certified and pilots are trained in its use, since it has to perform the non-trivial task of putting gun symbology on the HMDS? What’s the contingency situation – chewing gum on the windshield?

TVIP – So what you’re suggesting is that the F-35 will be as agile as an F-104? Maybe. It will certainly never be as good-looking.

Spud – The gun comes with 3F, which is due to IOC (with F-35C) in 8/18-2/19. Is there a schedule for when the AF gets operational with 3F? “Delivered” in this context means delivered for training.

After all these years, the most spectacular flight maneuver they can show is a two-second-plus roll (0:19>>) during which the jet drops like a fat pheasant taking a blast of 12-gauge to the kidneys.

Spurts now says “the data I had specifically tells the stability margin (CG with respect to the AC of the main wing, which can be geometrically found) so it was not hard to find the geometric CG and estimate the AC of the tailplane to find the moment arm from the center of mass.”

Which is certainly not the same as “The F-35 is more unstable than the F-16 judging from photos of the H. Stab position in turns ” which is what his paper says. That was the basis for imputing an effective lifting area (whatever that is) that is almost 2x the gross wing area. If you do that with no weight or drag penalty you can improve the paper performance quite considerably.

In short, his original methodology is still tosh (because you have no way of judging the downwash over the tail, and hence its alpha, from a photo) and his new methodology is a black box because it rests on “the data I had” and nobody knows what it is.

The analysis goes off the rails on slide 6 where stability is judged by the apparent position of the horizontal stabilizer, leading to a totally bogus “effective lift area”. Everything else falls apart from there, not that the fankiddies at f-16.net know or care. The problem is that claimed aerospace engineer “Spurts” is confusing incidence with alpha. The H-stab is in intense downwash from the wing and is in negative alpha even with positive incidence. Find out what company he works for and don’t ever fly on their airplanes.

OK, just found this again (and much more recent than anything from Hops).

http://web.archive.org/web/20110902125702/http://www.f35.com/resources/f-35-town-hall/q-and-a.aspx

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