Guess how much of that I understood :p

Don’t feel bad. I would have suggested everyone blow away their OS and reinstall it and see if that worked. 😀

Saw that in the news. That will be a good ship for them, for sure. er…. what kind of amphib AFVs do they have that can swim out of the well deck….. and are seaworthy enough to swim a few miles in some chop? Don’t know if that is one of their needs but be interesting to see how they use the well deck area.

There will still be a USAF. It does much more than just fly aircraft. Logistics planning and support, space systems, R&D requirements for various air breathing and non-air breathing systems. Most importantly is that today and into the future you won’t see the USAF disband as we know what the heck we are doing in program managing and sustaining air and space power platforms and systems. The Army is currently broken and it will be a long haul before they get their front office management act together. They can’t even handle basics of logistics planning and support on complex systems now. There isn’t enough learned corporate memory there to manage these systems, not without wrecking them anyway. Navy? Pretty good however they are always institutionally linked to the ship building mafia. Air and space systems there exist after funds have been put into shipbuilding. Note how everything on the carrier deck was necked down to make an excel spreadsheet work on budgets as ships had to be bought too.

No matter how good your network is it is still, given various weapons that are available today and certainly in the future- vulnerable. Wide area networks will never be totally warfare secure. Which is what you will need for some dream of total UAV domination. Local area networks however with a few manned systems and numerous unmanned systems will be more secure/redundant due to warfare taking out numerous or important nodes. I don’t see UAVs taking over all combat flying functions, maybe most. However they are very important. Example, I believe UCAS-D is the way to go for the next big thing in carrier aviation. Being able to run strike sorties over 1400 miles from the boat is a big deal.

DEW- Direct Energy Weapons. These will mature big time. Making the UCAV the pointy end of the spear for most combat work. That still leaves manned systems behind out of the reach of those deadly threats to oversee the LAN.

Home defense intercepts of wayward civil aircraft? Probably want a real set of eyes on that to call the shots. A UCAV going up that day with the LAN acting real dodgy might not be the way to go.

Also it will be 2009 or so before you see a laser pod deployed with the Rafale. Their current tour in Afcrapistan uses Mirage 2000’s to buddy lase.

One of my heros.

Yup PH, this guy was Phantom driver numero uno. And an awesome combat leader.

Hi Sens,

Especially since F-15s aren’t fly by wire. They are all control rods and cables with some digital assist. The small number of golden F-15Cs that will be upgraded to last into 2025 will most likely have all of the wiring harnesses ripped out of them again and replaced with new wiring harnesses that support the growth avionics, just like what happened with the upgrade years ago that gave it AMRAAM ability. Stacks of yanked out wire sitting by the jet at the depot. Be interesting to see what all the final upgrade includes besides the obvious that has been mentioned already in various recent stories. ( given our bad funding problems ). My opinion is that it won’t take much effort to strip a golden eagle of it’s status as the whole fleet of Cs is taking a thrashing through use. Be interesting to see how many they actually upgrade vs. what they currently say. Certain serial numbers of Cs a few years ago had a special consideration for some extra expensive rebuilds in the wing shop upon their next depot visit. With our current ops tempo I will be real surprised how many Cs we can push past 2025.

Don’t forget the F-18E/F is a newer design (at least the wings) than the F-15E.
I don’t think the F-15E has any airframe upgrades over the C…which is 25+ years old.

And you’d expect a naval fighter to have better corrosion resistance.

E airframe is significantly different than A-D. A-D airframe life is much lower. Part of the E design requirement was extra strength to include airframe life up to 15k-16k hours….. However at the end of the day all Eagles are jets that have to visit the depot every x amount of hours and be pulled apart and put back together again. 😀

Some other comments here,

Airframe life on Super? Well considering the weak R&D of the jet where it was scaled up from a legacy design the wings have caused all kinds of problems because it wasn’t prototyped right. The initial wing drop… fixed with a band aid… an early batch of production jets needing their barrel replaced after 500 hours, and of course the recent wing fiasco a few years ago that was band aid fixed. Also of note is the pointed out pylons to fix negative weapons clearance issues. Extra drag there.

It is a strike jet with great avionics. Great line maintenance. Inexpensive in the long haul in the current way USN does business. Will most likely end up being the safest combat jet to do carrier arrival and departure with due to it’s nice low speed handling and being easy to fly. PowerPoint warriors and accountants rule in the USN and Super helps keep costs low on aviation matters so the ship building mafia/lobby always gets their fief even if there are thinner budgets these days. Great avionics and brute raw performance are needed if you want to do air domination work. USN at least goes to war with several bushels of Tomahawks and USAF support. So the risk to the USN not having an air domination jet is a bit less vs. an ally making Super their big stick. Two current shoppers Malaysia and India if they get Super will at least have big SU for cover.

Comparing all of the combat performance only of a K inspired strike Eagle vs. a Super will leave the Strike Eagle with more points. Supers advantage is it costs less to operate, and it is of course carrier capable. Down selecting Strike Eagle on combat performance vs. Super is not possible. Down selecting Strike Eagle vs. Super on operating cost is.

And please lose the Super_Hornet_is_Stealthy nonsense. Super Hornet will have some advantage if it went to war with no external stores and the hardpoints removed. Other than that vs. modern radar, forget it, larger, more power output radars of today aren’t going to have trouble picking out a canted-out-pylon, stores carrying Super Hornet. Doing low observable enhancements to a design is always a good thing, however pointing to that as a survivable measure isn’t going to be good enough. The fact that Block II has a great AESA is what will give it some advantage of not broadcasting it’s position compared to other aircraft without good integrated AESA assisted avionics. Super Hornet won’t die due to a lack of S.A. That and the local area network hand-off of a team of Block II Super Hornets is what gives the team some real benefit. Of course other players have good LAN ability with their jets now too.

At one time a few years ago… B-1 maintenance was only funded at 49%…. MC rates got up to 51% only because of the extra hard work of the maintainers. I don’t count the start of OEF on Diego where they got really high MC rates. I would think some clever maintenance planers did something fleet wide ( I don’t know what ) so B-1s could at that time get high MC rates out of Diego.
Don’t know what B-1 maintenance is funded like today. Most likely with the latest budget disasters, it is real low.