That would depend upon the weight, size, and of course the deployment envelope of the HELADS on it. GA would have no doubt done the systems engineering and seen whether it could offer a value add. With limited integration and T&E budgets one would think the AC-130 integration, ShEILD and getting MDA to fund the HALE HEL effort would be more pressing investment tracks unless there is a spike in the money allocated to test out various HEL on aircraft configurations.

They must have liked what they saw on paper…

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc., or GA-ASI, the San Diego-based company that makes the Predator and Reaper drones, is undertaking a privately funded study to integrate a 150-kilowatt solid-state laser onto its Avenger (née Predator-C) drone. If the company succeeds, a drone with a high-energy laser will be a reality at some point in 2017, company executives told Defense One.

http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/09/drones-armed-high-energy-lasers-may-arrive-2017/121583/

Something like this should be planned from inception. The US itself certainly don’t want to share all of its data concerning emitter and signature libraries/templates and the same is true for other operators. If you plan a programme like this with international partners involved you know about this. It’s an organizational issue that could have been avoided quite easily.

It is an issue, but it is a policy issue and not one that is unique to the F-35. Did France give Egypt its most complete threat library when Egypt bought the Rafale? Do the Saudi Eurofighters have the exact same libraries as all other Eurofighter operators? There is no way to know, but it is a perfect example of the same problem.

It is somewhat complicated in this case by the fact that the US anticipates operating side by side with the other F-35 operators, but given that the US is by definition willing to export its latest and greatest stealth fighter to these buyers I see no reason to doubt they will work it out.

Anyone who realizes that variable cycles are only useful for achieving high supersonic performance while keeping the subsonic performance at a decent level. GE marketing aren’t fool, they’re going to quote the best case.

If variable cycles had any use for subsonic performance, we’d have seen them a long time ago on commercial airliners – the concept is hardly new (see the CV-99 engine study for re-engining Concorde nearly 30 years ago).

Of course with the advance in materials & numerical simulations, any engine designed now by GE or P&W should be able to achieve double digit SFC improvement over the F-135 engine for all flight regimes. The F135 relies on the hot sections of the F119 which is 25 years old now and SFC has historically improved by ~1% per year in the last two decades (but that’s only for clean sheet design, i.e. tweaking of old design only achieve half those gains). So materials alone would give a 15 to 20% improvement.

But the last 5 to 10% will be for the supersonic regime where the variable cycles make it possible to increase power while reducing the much less effective bypass flow and keeping the same frontal.

Re-engining fighters doesn’t have a great track record, the engine/frame matching is the result of multiple optimization loops and the actual gains are often much poorer than expected while the costs tend to be prohibitive. So I wouldn’t hold my breath over a hypothetical re-engining of the F-35 (or the F-22 even though it would benefit even more from the technology), these engines are meant for the next generation of US fighter/bomber/UCAV.

Ah, I see how you reached your conclusion, but you got it backwards.

Airliners are very highly optimized for one flight regime, their optimal cruise condition, which is where they spend the vast majority of their time. Airliners don’t go supersonic so there is zero effort devoted to balancing subsonic performance with supersonic performance. The optimization effort is 100% devoted to subsonic.

Fighters are completely different… while they spend the vast majority of their time flying subsonic, their designs have to allow for operation across a wide range of altitudes and of course supersonic flight. This is driven tradeoffs that have left fighters ridiculously inefficient in subsonic flight relative to civilian aircraft. The use of a variable cycle engine in a fighter would allow a fighter to achieve less-bad fuel economy in subsonic flight (the 30% range improvement) while achieving as good or better supersonic performance. Even with a variable cycle engine a supersonic fighter won’t be competitive with a civilian jet. (If you want to see what a subsonic optimized fighter would look like, picture the Textron Scorpion.)

The 25% better sfc is for the supersonic regime…

According to….?

30% improvement in range wouldn’t make much sense if supersonic.

The engine is to be installed in an airplane whose subsystems extract power to operate in the form of high pressure bleed for ECS and mechanical rotation for electrical generators and hydraulic pumps. Both sources of power come from the engine’s core which is the engine’s most “expensive” power because it had to compress , burn and expand that core flow to provide it. If we were talking about “less expensive” low spool power extraction it would have less impact to SFC. But that’s not the case here

And the only way to increase thrust with choked nozzle is to increase mass flow. This requires a larger inlet in the airframe with additional weight and drag, off setting some of the additional thrust.

The bottom line is that nothing is free. The benefits may not be as great as claimed based on predicted performance on a test stand with no power extraction to simulate airframe subsystems demands.

Do you see the slide above? I am pretty sure that the people who have been working on this project the last ten years, including building test articles, and who just received a billion dollar check to continue their work are aware of the constraints their engine will face in an aircraft.

Why should I believe you over them?

Adaptive cycle engine enters final phase of development

Exciting times, when these arrive they will make current engine designs look primitive in comparison.

Dept? Whole Europe is in dept more or less, what has that to do with anything?? Your post is on the JRS level. Full of Sputnik drama, but with no factual content.
Pls explain yourself in a more detailed way, in what way will Britain face a worse economical situation?

I heard the whole UK is breaking away from Europe and will soon float out into the middle of the Atlantic. The good news is they will be closer to the Falklands.