See, there is your problem right there.

What the f**k do the Congress, Senate and President know about designing aircraft?

No engineer can turn such bad fundamental program level requirements into a success. Its like trying to build a house on quicksand because the local mayor says so.

Bingo.

The Americans have such enormous advantages that they can usually afford to screw up pretty badly and still muddle through, but things are different this time around. Different enough for the program to qualify as catastrophic? Probably not, if only because F-35 is merely one piece of a much larger puzzle.

If this badBIOS is real then air gap will do jack ****. Irans Centrifuges were air-gapped too and guess what happened to them plus NSA has access to MS Windows source codes and security vulnerabilities
http://learning.criticalwatch.com/badbios/

Yes, it was security in the ‘NSA’ sense that I was referring to when questioning Windows. Ars Technica ran an interesting article recently on some of their hardware tricks.

Nobody has any comments on a design which appears to be a ramjet AIM-120?, k.

Given Russian experience with ramjets I don’t think anyone would doubt that Russia is able to design a Meteor-class weapon, it is merely a question of priorities. Didn’t we hear some time ago that funding for such ‘next generation’ munitions had been curtailed in favour of getting merely ‘modern’ munitions into volume production to replenish Soviet-era stocks?

the paint scheme doesn’t preclude it being used for training and for operations per se.

True enough, but still … priorities! Nations like Spain and Australia do not have jet aerobatic teams and Indonesian AF is not (yet) even at that level, yet they are mimicking even higher-tier AFs like UK, France, etc.

The idea that Indonesian AF has a jet-powered aerobatic team at all is faintly ridiculous tbh.

Do you really think that the aircraft will not be adversely affected by malicious code if you were to attempt to use it for missions contrary to US govt interest?

The F-35 software is undoubtedly compromised and awaiting US commands, but this hardly changes the situation when F-35 customers are reliant upon the US for logistical support anyway. At most it allows the US to ground the aircraft of ‘non-compliant’ nations more rapidly and comprehensively than they could otherwise.

It’s a pity we never got to see F-14E.

Fewer airframe hours too, less efficient platform and less differentiation from future KC-390. But short-term thinking prevails…

(I suspect the real answer is because A330 MRTT wouldn’t provide any work for Embraer whereas refurb and conversion of 767s does.)