The F-35C is a 9g aircraft just like the F-35A & F-35B! They are just limited to 7g during peacetime to extend there service life. All of those Carrier Landings and Take-Offs! So, if operated from landbases. It would be 9g capable as it sister models. Regardless, g alone hardly makes you case. As for who is better to judge “you” or Dr. Gates. I think everyone here already knows the answer!:p
Well Gates certainly doesn’t. USAF the real experts don’t agree with him either. Not just the guy that spoke up the other day but respected air planners like Gen Deptula have already stated that the F-35 wasn’t made to go into the threat areas that F-22 can. Mostly because of super-cruise where that high speed from lets say a side shot crossing angle makes the distance/no-escape zone of the missile to get a shot questionable.
Gates claiming… F-35 being roughly half the cost of an F-22, yeah right… less than 2 percent of the flight testing done. What business school did he go to? Then of course you have the dollar taking a rapid slide down to the peso as fast as it can go. This will ( and has already ) gotten interesting with the falling dollar value, where all the stuff from all of the worldwide JSF vendors is starting to get more expensive. Then the wheel turns even worse… government being government will slow down the buys if expense from the program gets higher. This in the long run will just make things worse. In the case of the USAF it is bad already as in 2006 they cut their annual JSF production slots from 110 down to 48 when they saw cost growth and extended out production arrivals all the way to 2035-38. Please tell me that anyone knows what funds congress will authorize for what weapon 20 years from now. No one does. It makes great eyewash for a briefing though. USAF is now trying to get the production slots but here is the other rub. JSF production efficiency is yet to be proven. Some are already worried about it having problems similar to the A380 and 787. A good comparison because those two depend on a lot of worldwide vendors also. Here are some fun comments from the other day on that:
The biggest challenge in the program today is manufacture, Davis said. “I’m worried about getting the manufacturing lines down the learning curves,” he told the conference. The JSF is showing some of the problems that have afflicted the Airbus A380 and Boeing 787 programs (although no major delays are manifest yet). Work is being performed out of sequence – for instance, many of 650 brackets in the wing are currently being installed after the wing has been mated to the body. Behind such problems are issues such as “requirements received late to schedule” – that is, by the time the design of a part has been finalized it is too late to ramp up production as planned.
Davis is also concerned about the complex integrated subsystems on the JSF, in which separate auxiliary, secondary and emergency power systems and environmental control are packaged into a single subsystem. “We’re working closely with them”, he says.
A bigger potential problem was raised by Lt Gen Raymond Johns, USAF deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and programs: the USAF won’t be able to afford its planned 110 JSFs a year under its projected total obligational authority (TOA). F-16s, he said, “will be coming out of the force at a rate of 100 a year from 2014. With our TOA, we can buy 48 JSFs per year, and the fighter force declines to 1400 aircraft.”
Currently, JSF plans call for the US total buy to reach 130 aircraft in 2015, with deliveries in 2017. The USAF does not have an internal solution to the problem, which would almost halve US purchases of the JSF in the peak production years with consequent effects on the production cost. “I can’t take more people out,” Johns said, “because I’m playing football with ten players as it is, and we don’t know where to go with infrastructure. It’s a question of the right level of gross domestic product to go to defense.”
http://tinyurl.com/2eqnz8
There are a lot of things to be proven on the JSF program.
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