You mean the timeframes and assurances that IOC will be this or that date which are now all in the past and that testing will not be necessary etc.?

Features and what they were designed for are not nearly as fluid as schedule and cost. One is almost exclusively in the hands of the people designing & building the plane and the other has many political “fingers in the pie”. Many of the delays in IOC and increases in cost are due to precisely the reason of wanting to meet the spec rather than sacrificing spec to meet cost & timeframe.

On the RCS front, officials have not only stated that the F-35 has passed the RCS measurement tests but have also stated that the RCS will actually improve over time as microscopic air-friction smoothing of the airframe takes place.

the serbs popping on radar right when you cant expect it,
yet you think that will change ??!

This is what is known about the shoot-down of the F-117 from interviews with the pilot and SAM operators (link1, link2):
1. The Serbs were listening in on “open” radio conversations between pilots and AWACS operators.
2. The Detection Radar was operating intermittently for 41 minutes prior to detecting the F-117
3. The Tracking Radar was used for 3 bursts of 20 seconds each in order to track the F-117
4. The F-117 was detected at 15km
5. After authorization to fire, it took 18 seconds to take out the F-117
6. The F-117 made no evasive maneuvers
7. At least two missiles were fired and only one was close enough to damage the F-117
8. Despite claims of a “moonless night”, it was an 85% waxing moon (almost full).

There are several things about this engagement that would not have happened with the F-35:
A. Comms are more secure when used over the radio (as opposed to datalinks)
B. All intra-JSF comms are datalinked
C. The F-35 carries, and automatically shares the data from, a very sophisticated ESM suite that would have detected both the Detection and Target Acquisition radars LONG before the the SAM was able to fire. The F-35 would certainly at the very least have reacted LONG before coming within 15km of the SAM site.
D. EODAS would provide the info to at least attempt evasive maneuvers. Considering only one of the SAMs got close enough for a prox-fuze detonation (above the F-117), this stood a good chance of succeeding)

btw, Col Zoltan is now a Baker.

It seems to me that one of the ALQ-99’s biggest weaknesses is that its horn antennas cannot focus its energy over “standoff” ranges. The NGJ and its AESA antennas should address that to a significant degree.

I never said that it would be a nonchalant ingress and egress, just disagreeing strongly with your rather wide-brushed claim that it will “need” EW support to be effective.

The F-35 was designed from the outset to operate without outside EW in a modern IADS environment. The only information from either the JPO, LM, or other DoD assets are in support of this claim and no credible source has said otherwise.

Will the F-35 need EW at some point in the future for certain mission, well, that’s obviously yes. But for the vast majority of it’s missions in the foreseeable future the answer is NO.

btw, There are several reasons that the USN is buying Growlers:
— It is the only service that provides EW
— It will have 4th gen assets to protect for the longest period (their Superhornets will be flying long after the last F-16 is retired from front-line use)
— The Growlers still have a fleet to protect regardless of what is flying

What timeframe and cost is actually unacceptable to you?

Since the F-35B is on track for IOC next year and the F-35A soon thereafter, what they have now is fine by me.

The -56 acquires it’s data via a IIR system just like the EODAS. The difference is that while the -56 process the data and only sends tracking info to the fusion engine, the EODAS sends tracking telemetry and live video.

Here are two videos showing the raw video feed from a -56 but like I said, the -56 only passes tracking info to the fusion engine.

lol.. Fox-4 is GUNS which that Phantom lacks :stupid:

in spite of some forum members insistence of M1.2 being the highest speed an F-15 ever used in combat

The quote that I have seen, and repeated, was from a USAF General and F-15 pilot who said “I can count on one hand the number of times the F-15C exceeded m1.2 in combat”.

This is a sample of what DIRCM does to an IIR seeker.

Unless the IRST has some sort of shielding then it will be affected in a similar manner and would make it useless and would only serve as a “something is out there” sensor.

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