On the other hand, the claim that it would be less costly over its life cycle than the F-16 was widely believed because it was made officially and repeatedly.

Lukos – As I noted, to use an F-16 with no external tanks as the basis for any range comparison is utterly foolish, because the aircraft was not designed to operate that way. And please provide a reference for an F-35B gaining 200 nm extra range with external tanks when it is documented that the F-35A gains only 70 nm. Or save your wisdom for some forum where you will be considered a genius, which seems to be where you got your wing-loading estimates. By the way, those estimates are rubbish because the soi-disant “aerospace engineer” responsible made an elementary error early in his calculations. Alpha ain’t incidence, dude.

Hotshot – Apart from silly point-scoring: Yes, the F-16 carries CFTs, an advantage at long range, and they are included in the 630 nm chart that Spud reproduced and with which I am very familiar. So far, the F-35 cannot carry CFTs, and most likely never will.

Levsha – Dunno, have you ever seen an F-104 with 4x AAMs and 2x 2k bombs and a 630 nm range? I have not. The F-15E and Rafale also have warload-radius capability that surpasses earlier supersonic fighters. So let me fix your statement: “When it comes to aircraft range or combat radius the improvement gained from one generation to another has generally been more than incremental, until the development of the F-22 and F-35.”

FBW – Seek “F-35 HMMH” and ye shall find.

Nothing wrong with spending some time in Linkoping.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]232223[/ATTACH]

Features and what they were designed for are not nearly as fluid as schedule and cost. One is almost exclusively in the hands of the people designing & building the plane and the other has many political “fingers in the pie”. Many of the delays in IOC and increases in cost are due to precisely the reason of wanting to meet the spec rather than sacrificing spec to meet cost & timeframe.

The first two sentences are almost meaningless. The third is merely confirming that LockMart signed a contract to do something that they did not know how to do, but fails to tell the story – in many problem areas there was no way to “sacrifice spec” because the result would be useless, STOVL OEW being an obvious example.

On the RCS front, officials have not only stated that the F-35 has passed the RCS measurement tests but have also stated that the RCS will actually improve over time as microscopic air-friction smoothing of the airframe takes place.

Let’s wait for that highly improbable claim to be guaranteed under contract.

“The only information from either the JPO, LM, or other DoD assets are in support of this claim”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandy_Rice-Davies#.22He_would.2C_wouldn.27t_he.3F.22

The earliest goal of stealth was to go in silent but basically dumb. The next step (before the F-117 was operational) was computer-aided EOB modelling and routing. The B-2 was designed around real-time routing, as were the F-22 (1986 requirement) and F-35 (1996).

And of course there has been no advance whatsoever in radar technology between 1996 and today.

F-35 operations will have to deal with VHF and other modern threats either by routing, suppression or jamming. As ACC boss Hostage has noted, it may be different from classic Growler noise jamming (but then, that’s one of the things NGJ is intended to do).

TVIP – In the case of the USAF (and everyone except the USN), what giant fleet of supporting assets are you talking about? The EF-111 and F-4G have been gone for a while, in case you hadn’t noticed, and the USAF has not even bought into AGM-88E for its remaining F-16CJs.

Mr Potato-Head – Errrm, where are the CAPE estimates on that graphic? CAPE is only one input to SAR, mostly concerned with operating costs (which as the latest GAO report shows and the JPO/DOD does not dispute, are still 80 per cent above the aircraft Porky is due to replace). Most of the JPO-versus-CAPE difference is based on inflation assumptions – the base-year cost per flight hour has changed very little.