I have seen references that it may house an IFF transceiver.

They don’t need to show you or anyone else anything.

/captainobvious.

Chill dude… Somebody is a bit touchy 🙂

One guess as to why they don’t show the other side of the plane :dev2:

He actually said that the RCS of the “35” was smaller than the “22”.

He said it both ways

“The F-35 doesn’t have the altitude, doesn’t have the speed [of the F-22], but it can beat the F-22 in stealth.” But stealth — the ability to elude or greatly complicate an enemy’s ability to find and destroy an aircraft using a combination of design, tactics and technology — is not a magic pill, Hostage reminds us.

He likely mixed up his RCS/Stealth terminology just like the Day/Week terms re:F-117.

I have nothing against selection of F-35, AFTER a fair competition. Remember F-35 lost competition in Korea before hugely heavy US lobbying reversed the decision…

In South Korea, the competition was put together by the people who would PAY for it rather than by the people who would USE it.

Not surprisingly the main driver was COST and it lost on that basis.

However, the people who actually have to put their lives on the line were able to make a compromise with the people who PAY for it and they both got what they wanted (COST cap and CAPABILITY).

heavily hit by political and fiscal decisions and indecisions that have not affected JSF.

Really?

Last I checked it has had it’s annual buy reduced almost every year and had it’s SDD program extended instead of annual budget increased. This has caused MAJOR concerns with our Partner nations who now have to pay a lot more for LRIP aircraft which has caused them to delay IOC & increase their OP budgets for existing aircraft.

Then there is the issue of heavy backpedaling re concurrency.

Come again on the lack of fiscal and political indecision?

All I saw was a politician reading APA releases and trying to get classified info out of the Defense guys into the public record.

He continually got his “facts”, timelines, programs, features, etc wrong and mixed them up on several occasions. He was apparently upset that the first two F-35s were not coming to Australia but staying in the US as part of the training pool and could not understand why they needed the F-35s for years prior to IOC. Apparently he has never heard of training or similar cooperative programs used for the F-16/15/18 going back 30+ years.

I think the Defense officials were quite patient with him.

Yes that isn’t the biggest difference but big enough they went back to 1000lbs bombs for the F-35B

Not to nitpick, but it’s 1500lbs.

Also, the original JSF program only called for the Naval version to carry a 2k bomb while the USAF and USMC versions only wanted a 1k bomb.