And then there was This

Brilliant! The Bird of Prey’s grandfather.

i believe F-14 was the first fighter with irst.
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1950’s F-101 F-102

No no no no, the F-22 was cancelled because they thought the F-35 was going to ramp up really fast. The USAF would never have stopped procuring F-22 if they had nothing else to put in production.

No, no, no & no. The USAF had nothing to do with the decision to stop F-22 production. Several generals ruined thier careers pushing for more F-22’s in the face of Gates telling them to stop advocating for more F-22.

Even as Gates was cancelling further production, the USAF was presenting studies that 240 F-22 represented the “minimum acceptable risk”. Gates cancelled the F-22 to direct funding to UAV and MRAPS, and various sundry weapons that the US military is trying to divest themselves from as useless since the troop drawdowns in Iraq and Afganistan. He accused the USAF of “Next war-Itis” and claimed that the decision was “not even close”. This was while the F-35 program was in the midst of foundering so claiming the cancellation of the F-22 was due to the F-35 is patently incorrect.

I understand that, but what happens if next year they figure that the plane can’t eject its AMRAAM at mach 1.6 from the internal a/g station. That means that about 200 F-35s that have been build won’t be usable as fighters, including international ones. The JPO would say that it’s unlikely but you never know.

Well, because the already have modeled weapon separation. They don’t just strap a weapon to a 100+ million dollar fighter and say ” k, bob get her up to 600 knots then drop that sucker and let’s see what happens”.

They model it, do pit testing. obviously there are still unknowns and some risk. Here is a Lockheed presentation on it:
http://pages.mscsoftware.com/rs/mscsoftware/images/F-35%20Joint%20Strike%20Fighter-%20Store%20Separation%20Flight%20Test%20and%20Analysis.pdf

Weapon separation tests/ accuracy tests speeding up:

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/block-3f-software-aids-f-35-weapons-test-428711/

Also, why would you hamper an Air Force fighter with thousands of pounds of structural modifications, heavy landing gear, of a carrier based fighter.

There is a greater than 2 1/2 ton difference between the A and the C.