Most of the systems (APG-81, EOTS, EODAS, ESM, etc) have been through years of lab and flight testing and what they can and cannot do is well known at this point.
The only unknown is exact airframe performance and how long it will take to integrate the info from all the individual systems.
If what you say were true, the then the 757 flying lab would have taken care of most of the mission system problems with the F-22. It did not. It only helped. A flying lab is not the F-35 with all of the associated thermal issues, vibration, and other things that cannot be simulated in a 737 airframe. Nice try though.
Sorry Hotdog.
I used the term too.
JORD. The Joint Operational Requirement Document. Normally just an ORD but since all 3 services had to reach an agreement of what this family of variants should do, the J was added. It was thrown around for a few years and then signed off on in 2000
Here is a bit of history on it (PDF)
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ac/docs/jsf-pubrelbrief.pdf
Odd how the word “affordable” keeps coming up. So many times just in one slide. Oh and “Model acquisition program” on the first slide. Oh dear.
Also Hotdog, here is a good brief from 1997 (PDF)
http://www.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/TD/td1801/steidle.pdf
one of the former JSF program bosses gives an over view of what lead up to the JORD. Interesting. it was this same guy who stated that the JSF business plan wouldn’t start breaking even on costs until you made about 1600 airframes. Those must have been amazing days. Not so much now.
Kind of funny. Someone pointed out to me about the Cutlass hook distance and well…what about that? IT TRAPPED !!!!
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Why yes it did. With the aid of a very long nose gear to aid in AOA.
A literature search for ASQ-239 and “Lord Voldemort” failed to produce a single hit, and an earlier search for ASQ-239 was equally unsuccessful. My copies of IDR (like you, I prefer the older version of the acronym) from that year have long gone to into the recycling bin. Only by such desperate measures can I maintain a negotiable path from the door of my office to my desk.
Professor Streetly (who still teaches The Dark Arts at Jane’s School of Defence Technology) does not list the ASQ-239 in the copy of his well-known grimoire that is currently in my possession.
Both the Super Hornet Block II and the F-35 are second tier fighters. It is unrealistic for them to face emerging threats.
Which leaves you with legacy threats (Kosovo etc) where towed decoys like the ALE-50 worked very well.
The F-35 only has forward cone in-band “jamming’ of the fighter-sized AESA. Power and cooling are real factors with the fighter-sized AESA. There has been insufficient proof that the fighter AESA in the nose can act as this kind of jammer. F-22 was unsuccessful in this regard (power-heat-sustained power). The RAAF commented this was an over-sell item with the AESAs in their new Super Hornets.
With that, a USN study showed that for legacy threats, low observable qualities, combined with self-defense jamming helps. The mention of the turn and RCS increase while obvious, is important to mention to fankiddies and ignorant political types who when hearing the word “stealth” must think its all good.
So back to legacy threats and the Super Hornet Block II. Like the B-1 bomber design, a “tuned” / managed airframe with lower RCS enhancements (not a stealth aircraft) lets the self defense jammer work more efficiently. This saved 5000lb of weight on the B-1 when they put LO enhancements for the forward facing sector. They pumped most of that 5000lb of weight savings back into EWO gear. The depot software lab for the B-1 is impressive. Racks upon racks of all the EWO stuff of which there is a lot. It was also a beneficiary of Kosovo with the ALE-50 btw.
So back to the Super Hornet Block II. Lower RCS than the Block I because the AESA is always in the “stowed” position where you have to put the mechanical APG-73 into that position and then get little use out of it.
The Super airframe has a bunch of LO enhancements for the forward sector (almost a credible PACMAN). Now, while hanging stores on the aircraft certainly don’t help much for anything approaching LO, the “knowns” of the Super Hornet airframe now “tuned” means that its self-defense system IDECM (the brains of the self-defense system), AN/ALR-67 (pretty good passive geo-location kit), the 214 self-defense jammer, the towed decoy, (now going to ALE-55 a leap ahead becase IDECM can make it emit now as a jammer not just a spoofer), a largish amount of expendable decoy buckets and you have (sorry to sound like a Boeing sales brochure) a balanced approach to this mess.
Add to that; stand off; the Super was always about I can touch you but you can’t touch me for facing legacy threats, JDAM, JSOW, etc. –balanced.
So even pudgy super slow vs. legacy threats brings so much more value than the Just So Failed. With that, the F-35 (if they were to solve the show stoppers) should meet its JORD survival requirements. Some light reading on the topic below. However that JORD is pretty lackluster.
http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-2009-01.html
Let us reverse it then Fox.
What will actually make the F-35C viable? That is what will get it aboard the ship? Consider this from the quicklook in Nov 2011.
The hook is in the wrong place. All the roll tests failed. Yet they had a critical design review (CDR) in 2007 which LM claimed: “2007 saw the completion of the critical design review for the F-35C. The completion of CDR is a sign that each F-35 variant is mature and ready for production.”
But that just doesn’t seem to be the case. If they can’t solve the hook problem, the F-35C is done. For sure. It is not a trivial fix. Location of the hook and not the shaping is what will determine success for this one item. Yet what do they do? The aircraft is already at paper-thin weight margins. Any add on will add to weight. Note that the next closest hook distance measurement is on an A-4. Yet that had a nose gear extension for take-off and landing.
So my thinking that the F-35C is done, is not an impossibility. Given all the other engineering management screw ups, what we have is a program that is in dire trouble. It isn’t just one thing. It is a pattern of a lot of things.
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