The F-35 is designed to be a coalition strike aircraft with some self defense ability.

Wrong Eric. The F-35 is designed to be a true multi role fighter with strike capability second to none and an air to air capability second only to the Raptor.

You are hoping among hopes aren’t you? 8 ??? How about 10? This will be interesting to see. It is nice to see you comparing it to the performance of a 30 plus year old design. Even if you don’t have any sustained flight test with a go-to-war mission system equipped jet to back up your theory of it being all singing and all dancing.

LM has stated publicly that while four AAMs will be carried internally at first, studies show that there is no reason why an additional 2 to 4 AMRAAMs could be carried internally if someone thinks it important enough to fund the integration. Obviously those who know much better than you don’t seem to think its an issue. What 30 plus year old design Eric? Does it really matter a clean Block 50 is going to outperform just about any combat loaded aircraft as easily as a clean F1 would to this day. Tell me Eric what would your sustained flight tests show that cannot already be extrapolated with data that they already have? Clearly you have no clue. In fact your “arguments” get lamer and lamer and this “there has been no extended flight testing therefore F-35 is bound to fail argument of yours only goes to paint you in a less than complementary light.

It is not an F-35 and can not simulate the vibration and heat-sink issues,

What vibration, what heat issues? But then again no the catBird does not have the same vibration and heat profile as the F-35. You collect that data during flight tests with the F-35 and you model it with the data from the catBird testing. Then you compare your sample results with that which you collect using the actual F-35 and see if the model produces the same results as your sample from the actual F-35. YOU DON’T NEED HUNDREDS OF FLIGHT TESTS OF EVERY SINGLE COMPONENT TO DO THIS. I don’t know how clearer I can put it to you Eric. It’s not 1969 anymore.

Right now NO KPPs have been met.

Which ones haven’t been? Which ones are at risk for not being met? Name one with a verifiable source.

Is that so? Buy them with what? More Chicom credit?

I see your understanding of macro economics is easily as bad as your understanding of modern fighter jet development. I won’t go into a long winded argument but I will list a few things for you to ponder. Global reserve currency, debt as a percentage of national wealth, exchanging hard durable goods for slips of paper, who controls the most gold.

Deputy PEO, Capt. Wade Knudson, stated at the Navy league gathering in May, that the reasons for the delays were to the engine that failed, “tweaking” the software controlling the leading edges and ensuring that the nine doors that open during STOVL all operated correctly. This was right after the recent hover pit tests. Surprise, surprise.

And your point is? The test was delayed one month? Two? Most of September is still summer of 2009.

More lame Eric Palmer arguments. Face it you are clutching at straws. Let me know when there is a major problem or shortfall that has yet to be resolved and then we can talk, otherwise your arguments are nothing more than trolling in order to draw attention to yourself.

You cannot shut it down, only control it by showing the emitter certain azimuth and elevation angles at distances known to be below the emitter’s detection threshold for his current pulse repetition rate. But if your adversary catches a glimpse of you with a GCI/EW/TA radar, he can initiate a cued search with his TTRs. Cued search increases the pulse repetition rate, flooding a sector with RF that increases the TTR’s range and probability of detection. You don’t want to be “the deer caught in the headlights”, normally unseen when standing outside the reach of low beams, but fully visible when the driver switches on his high beams.

Bad writing on my part. Rather than “shut it down” I should have wrote “degrade”. But still how effective is increasing your pulse rate when your return is degraded? I understand that the greater the pulse frequency the higher the probability of detection but if it really resulted in measurable increase in detectability then why not use a high pulse rate all the time to defeat stealthy aircraft?

But there are VHF and UHF EW and GCI radars that can be used to vector interceptors. And L band and S band SAM target acquisition radars that hand off to C, X and Ka band target tracking radars.

Its all about knowing your RCS, geolocating the threat emitter, using your knowledge of radar technology and you can successfully prevent them from detecting you as you go about your business of locating/killing their ground targets. Break the “find” and “fix” links in the kill chain as well as the “target”, “track” and “engage” links.

Good points but the bulk of the “kill” or track and target are X band. Shut that down and degrade the rest.

That’s some heavy g manoeuvring indeed, especially those “over the top” scissors and with centerline tank too. Just check the sound pitch rising due the g loading…
Nice clip, thx.
However, this still isn’t the limit (no tip’s and fuselage’s vortexes yet, just wing’s), let alone “beyond the curve”…However, the most impressive is how slowly EF looses energy (something atypical for delta in manoeuvre), so I guess the pilot uses DFC excessively (apart from not pushing the airframe to the limit). Anyway, it’s far beyond any classic configuration.
Btw, I have a clip in which DA(dunno number) rolls 360° in about 1 sec!, so check EF entry at the end of the film (8:13) 🙂 The film is from YouTube, but is no longer hosted there.
http://www.2shared.com/file/6007628/ed8fa4a6/GermanArmedForces.html

Cheers, Cola

Maybe you should compare it to a demo with a full combat load instead of one center line tank. Try this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeDWlJauHwQ

With only 48 a/c, it’s strange that Norway put such emphasis on strike.
I’d imagine they are going to have a hard time just intercepting incoming, much less launch strikes on their own.

How so? I agree 48 aircraft is not much but do you really think Gripen or Typhoon is anywhere close to the F-35 in air to air capability?

But lets move on. No kidding that missiles have high g. So do the ones coming out of an F-22 which by the way with altitude and speed, give AMRAAM shots a 40-50% push on reach and of course a better NEZ. The aircraft has no peer and the F-35 is in no way just a less expensive F-22, no matter how much LM does their “5th generation” marketing hype that rides on the coat tails of the F-22.

So a F-35 can’t launch a missile at high altitude and speed as well. Give up Eric. I think the Raptor has no equal and it has many advantages over all fighters including the F-35 but that one is just plain lame.

I find it amusing that people push the F-35 as some kind of air superiority machine without anything to back it up. 4-6 A2A missiles in an F-35 weapons bay? Show me the real weapons clearance from real weapons drops. The 6 will be especially interesting. Anyone for 8?

Actually fitting 8 internally is a possibility. What about the radar? What about DAS, what about the fact that with a combat load out it performs as well as or better than a clean F-16. You bet it will be a fine air superiority machine even without stealth. See Eric Karlo did not tell you that it’s all about who can put weapons on who first and in order to do that you have to detect and track your adversary. You may want to do some research on “first look first kill”. Due to the fact that the F-35 will essentially fly clean in A2A in real world terms it will have better performance than any other fighter bar the Raptor.

CATBird. Lets see. Not much vibration, and what? The performance envelope of a 737. But not the fighter itself (heat, vibration, big G). Definitely a good thing to do. And well LM is pushing it like it has never been done before (look at the old briefings). Yet the F-22 did this with a special 757 lab. And the F-35 has over three times as much software. What was the reason that Block 1, 2, and 3 definitions were watered down in 2008 from their 2006 requirement? Don’t know. But it makes for some interesting thinking. With CAIV (cost as an independent variable) driving the whole program, “Anything is possible if you are willing to lower your expectations.” You can trade away almost anything except an equal number of take-offs and landings.

catBIRD has nothing to do with CAIV so right off you prove you have no idea about what you are talking about. catBIRD allows you to perform a large PORTION of the testing of the F-35s avionics while in flight under controlled conditions. Testing in a controlled environment while simulating real (airborne) conditions is considered a best practice. catBird is a flying testbed that will allow a great deal of testing of those 2 million lines of code quickly and relatively inexpensively.

As for lowering expectations, tell me what expectations have been lowered so far. What KPP has the program not met or not projected to meet? You keep babbling about missing something or the plane not working out but everything up to now indicates just the opposite.

The F-35 program had a lot of potential until the marketing crew got ahold of it. Yet we have so much more entertainment ahead of us. The F-35 plan had 317 test flights lined up for FY 2009. Where are they? There are over 1200 for the FY2010 schedule not counting the make up work.

What plan Eric? They are ramping up production and the Air Force is going to buy hundreds of F-35s in the next few years

The 1st Quarter 2009 LM vid says first STOVL flight this summer. Just a little bit of time later at the Navy League gathering it was pushed to September. Funny how that didn’t show up in a computer sim. It showed up at the end of the latest hover pit test done in primo drag racing weather. Real testing.

You are having a drunken ramble Eric. What didn’t show up in a computer sim? The fact that the engine produced more thrust in hover? Summer does not end until September 22nd. Maybe they pushed nothing.

Yet the U.S. taxpayer is asked to build hundreds of mistake jets.

Tell us Eric. What mistake?

As with the beginning of your post the rest of it is nonsense not worthy of reply amd I have better things to do. Your lack of presence on shall we say more technically astute forums is telling. I realize you are trying to become a “journalist” and you are trying to drive traffic to your blog but you really should try to write in a more credible manner lest your readership become a gaggle of trolls and cretins.

Nothing is invisible below 2 GHz.

Perhaps but x band operates at much higher frequencies. Two gig is microwave territory.

Now go calculate the effective ground speed of the F-22 moving at 55k, 60k and so on.

….”The days of absolute speed and maneuverability being of paramount importance are over…”

This is an especially important point to make when you are selling a product that doesn’t have super-maneuver or the speed (contempt of engagement) or extreme altitude to decide when and how it wants to enter the fight.

As for WVR, guess again. HOBS is available now. HOBS is pretty much 1:1 kill ratio stuff unless your opponent has more HOBS than you do. Your sales technique needs work.

Note the comparison. Fine goals for the F-35… when it actually proves itself…

Next I am sure we will hear that flight testing is over-rated.

Where do we start Eric? I like that first graphic of yours. I noticed it had a lot of the terms you coined but no one else much seems to buy into them. What did you use MS Paint to make the circles? Did you hang the picture on the fridge with a gold star you gave yourself?

Hmm super maneuverability and speed. The last I looked M1.6-1.8 is plenty of speed and everything other than a Raptor is only going to go maybe M0.9 – M1.2 for any period of time. I won’t go into how long you can go on military power is a far better indicator of an aircraft’s ability to escape a foe than absolute speed, rather since I am pinched for time I will point out two very big holes in your “argument”. Missiles pull upward of 30gs and go M3.5. The ability to detect and track your foe long before he can do the same allows you to chose the terms of engagement.

As for WVR you still have anywhere between 4 and 6 AMRAAMs in your weapons bay and they still allow for off bore site shots. Who says all your F-35s have to carry all internal weapons? You can hang them on the wings, take your BVR shots with them and then use the internal missiles for WVR if it gets down to it. You see Eric, stealth and an internal weapons bay gives you options that you don’t otherwise have. Oh did we mention the F-35 in combat trim has about the same performance as a clean F-16 Block 50? Not too shabby. But again, you said it. WVR is pretty much 1:1 so why would I want to even do that?

No flight testing is not over rated it’s just that modeling, simulations and the use of flying test beds like Catbird have made the number of flight tests less important.
http://mae.pennnet.com/display_article/363148/32/NEWS/none/none/1/Lockheed-Martin-F-35-CatBIRD-shows-key-avionics-capability,-reliability-at-Edwards-Air-Force-Base/

How much flight testing do you have to do to verify your test results? How much flight testing do you have to do to verify predicted flight parameters?

See Eric I do this sort of thing for a living. You model and simulate as much as you can and you compare those results against prior results. What do you do besides fix MS Word problems for secretaries, blog and act as Kopps mouthpiece?

I’ll just quote “The slight buffet remains constant from twenty-six degrees to about forty degrees AOA, where it decreases.”

Well, so much about unlimited AoA for Raptor

Where does the article say it does not have unlimited AoA?