FBWIt’s good that you don’t. At least you can concentrate on the contents of the message, not the messenger himself.
Most of the die-hard F-35 fanboys here are able to dismiss a claim based purely on the author’s name.. regardless of how many times his claims have been proven right.. but at the same time want to sell us Code One, which is LM’s paid and owned propaganda leaflet, as a source of objective information.
Yeah, Msphere he has a great track record:
Pierre Spray’s dubious comments:
Eurofighter Typhoon-“[The Eurofighter Typhoon] has never been a very good airplane. It is rather large, very expensive. Of course we build more expensive airplanes to say the least. But it is relatively unmaneuverable, far too complex for its missions, hard to maintain, and very hard to get very many sorties per week out of it because of the complexity.”
F-22– “The F-16A, as it was in 1986, can whip today’s F-22,” said Sprey. “You’d think the F-22 would be able to whip some antique.”
Sprey said the Raptor is too heavy, reliant on sensors and other technology, slow, and too reliant on stealth to be useful in today’s combat environment over rough terrain against a relatively unsophisticated, guerilla enemy.”
Su-30 MKI “The Su-30MK is simply another modification of the Su-27, a not-very-high-performing Russian imitation of our F-15 that had its prototype flight in 1977. The new version is significantly heavier and has poorer dogfight acceleration and turn than the original, mainly because of all the weighty and draggy gadgetry (e.g., canards, vectored thrust nozzles) added to allow these spectacular maneuvers” The more of these turkeys the Russkies sell, the longer the now-ancient F-16 (designed in 1972) will reign supreme as the world’s best fighter.
Pierre Sprey on Amraam “Sidewinder “is the one unequivocal missile success,“- One possible alternative, scrapping AMRAAM in favor of a much larger number of the latest Sidewinders, would provide a big, immediate jump in air combat capability, and at a fraction of AMRAAM`s cost.
Pierre Sprey’s views on air combat (love this- he seems to be unaware of AWACS, GCI, RWR, or aircraft radars themselves) “As opposed to the BVR dream, actual air combat almost invariably starts with
two or more attackers “bouncing” and surprising an unaware flight of fighters at Attackers
must close to within roughly a quarter mile or less to get positive eyeball identification of friend or foe (no current electronic identification is secure enough to prevent shooting friends) before maneuvering into missile or cannon
firing position, then getting a shot off as quickly as possible.”
Oh, he also took time in the 80’s to trash the F-15 and the M-1 tank, obviously those claims were right!
Ironic, you find yourself agreeing with him on one aircraft, because you like Sprey don’t quite seem to grasp modern air combat.
FBWTrue, if you use the daft approach of coupling mission software with flight software.
Decouple the two and all of a sudden DAL for the mission software drops, reducing by orders of magnitude the degree of verification and testing required; this has a corresponding effect on time-to-code and cost-to-code.
If you put in the lid of your cynicism, you wouldn’t have forgotten the SAAB, Eurofighter examples .
Nor would you have ignored that all but L-M did decouple the FCS from mission software. Doesn’t speed up weapon integration, IDAS integration (which needs to be integrated), or threat libraries.
But noooo, I’m sure that there is an easier way to write millions of line of code if you don’t take that daft “Western” approach.
FBWI am not sure the comprehensive electronics suit would have been ready for serial production by 2016 in any case. They are still tacking on parts of it/juggling them around on the current flyers and the new per-serials from what I understand.
That is the 10,000 pound gorilla in the room, What is the the single biggest bottleneck with modern fighter development? It ain’t the airframe. We know that that the T-50 had structural and engine issues, those are common in new fighter dev. What is the one area that you hear very little about with the Pak-Fa project, Hints? Time and money are needed and the serial Pak-Fa production is probably years off. At least the definitive examples that India is expecting.
FBWWith the way things are going with 5th gen fighter development, I would like to see the usaf, not throw away such a vital, and still effective asset. Id propose.
-A refiit of the baseline F-117 that replaces the difficult to maintain stealth paint with a fiber mat solution.
-Certify the F-117 to drop jassm jsow and sdb. The plane would make an excellent stand off weapons platform.
-replace the flir with a sabre aesa lpi derivative.
-If the radar is to exspensive give the plane a MALD to talk to F-35s
– when not bombing use the plane for a data node between F-22, F-35, datalinks and link 16.-give the plane self defense weapons, Aim9X
-A modern avionics system. You could put an Ipad in the cockpit, and it would be an upgrade.Discuss, am I delusional? If we fight a neer peer it will be years before we have enough F-35s. Is the block 2B F-35 still an upgrade over F-117?
while we are at it we will just “stealthify”” the F-15. After all, adding LO features is just that easy.. oh wait. The USAF spent billions on developing integrated avionics and platforms over the last 20 years cause it is simple to retrofit honeycomb structure and materials, integrated sensors and CIP, software, to any existing fighter. oops, no it isn’t.
FBWF-35 Bogdan testimony:
http://youtu.be/hBhyxIgauWM
FBWIf F-35 would win dogfight over F-16, it would be all over news.
But it wasn’t. So the conclusion is … figure out for yourself :dev2:.
Brilliant! Ignoring 35 pages of posts with details and arguments with actual analysis, you came up with the perfect summary of the ignorance displayed by those who love flashy headlines.
Bit heavy on the sarcasm, but really, there has been enough written, enough articles published, regarding the F-35 test report. There is no excuse for just reading a headline and drawing such an absurd conclusion.
BTW, there have been plenty of press releases about flights of F-35’s dominating F-16s in exercises. Can we draw up an overarching conclusion from that too? Hmmm.
Sadly, even defense reporting has become the twitterverse: 100 flashy words to summarize so people don’t have to research and think for themselves.
FBWLRS-B selection “coming soon”….. for the better part of six months now. I doubt that they will address what the delay was, but I would be curious.
http://breakingdefense.com/2015/10/lrsb-contract-coming-very-very-soon-laplante/
FBWAbout the F-35, as far as I can read it:
– no direct purchase (illegal in Canada btw)
– Stealth first strike capability isn’t needed (so the F-35 isn’t the only option available to choose from)The F-35 isn’t rejected (it would be as illegal to directly reject it as it was to directly buy it), but if LM wants to sell it to Canada, they’ll have to participate in a real competition (and the argument “we don’t do it as we are too good anyway” isn’t acceptable)
Trudeau has explicitly stated that he opposes the F-35 and will seek “more affordable” fighters.
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/justin-trudeau-vows-to-ditch-f-35
https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/lockheed-f-35-heads-to-the-polls-in-canada-417872/
So any “fair” competition will exclude the F-35 if Trudeau’s campaign promises are to be met. As I stated above, what this realistically means is that Canada will not be replacing the CF-188 any time in the near future.
An open competition will likely take years, and by then, we could be looking at the next Parliamentary election cycle. MMRCA anyone?
There is no doubt this is a political black eye for L-M’s marketing of the F-35. If Canada chooses the Rhino, it could keep Boeing in the fighter game and keep that production line warm post 2018.
The cancellation of the 65 aircraft production run will most likely have negligible impact on production ramp up or unit cost as Japan and Korea would move up in the queue and Canada did not have firm orders.
FBWBold Prediction, Trudeau will axe the F-35 procurement. And for the next five years, no decision will be made on a CF-118 replacement. In 2020, the RCAF will still be flying CF-118 with no replacement timeline in sight.
FBWAnd when I see poster is using “spinning” tactics to make a point I usually lose the interest in further discussion:
Cheers!
No offense, but I lost interest in this after the second post. There was no “spinning”, your trying to read opinions I do not have into my post. Again go back and read the thread.
Not trying to be rude but after your second time of trying to parse through my post, when I already said that I got your point felt like you were splitting hairs, this just seems argumentative and a waste of space and time.
FBWA trapezoidal wing planform only works well for supersonic flight if the wing is thin.
bit overstated? The thinner the wing the less wave drag, but it’s relative. The F-104 airfoil had a t/c ratio 3.36 and AR of 2.45
The F-22 has an AR 2.36, and t/c-root 5.92 t/c- tip 4.29
The F-35’s airfoil has an AR of 2.66 and a t/c-root of 6 t/c-tip= ? (according to some it uses a modified NACA 64A-206 airfoil)
In terms of AR and t/c the F-22 wing and the F-35 wings are similar. The F-16 has a higher aspect ratio, thinner wing.
FBWF-35 fineness ratio and wing sweep sux. But that is the tradeoff when the Marine version of the jet has to fit on an LHD.
Fineness ratio is an issue. Wing sweep is not. The US uses trapezoidal wings almost exclusively. There was a poster on here who claimed that the F-35 wing sweep shows that it was a “marginally supersonic” aircraft. I won’t call him out by name. The F-104 was first US mach 2 fighter and the first operational fighter to use that wing shape , so no you can’t look at wing sweep angle exclusively.
The Trapezoidal wing really does not have sweep as the trailing edge sweeps forward. It is hard to see by comparing the F-22 wing with the F-35 wing, but look at the YF-22 wing and F-35 wing. Low aspect ratio and good high speed performance, but every wing has drawbacks.
FBWTrue, F-35 acceleration is bad, but not that bad. IIRC, new F-35’s KPP is, from M0,8 to M1,2 in less than 63 seconds with 60% fuel and 2-AIM-120s and 2x2000lb JDAMs.
In reality, the fuel load included in the F-35’s acceleration specification can only be guessed. In the Australian Parlimentary Hearings, Osley seemed to confirm that the loadout was full weapons load and fuel. The only two configurations given for F-35 performance thresholds are for the sustained 30 degree bank turn, and the 9g maneuver configuration. BTW, even though everyone uses the term “KPP” the performance thresholds are not key performance parameters.
On F-16, that equates to more than 100% fuel. Weight and drag indexes are:
F-16C = 20200 lbs, DI = +7
Fuel = 7116 lbs
Chaff/flare = 96 lbs
Gun Ammo = 286 lbs
2xLAU-129 in place of 16S301 = 30 lbs DI = +2 (Putting AIM-120s at wingtip for minimal drag&weight)
2xAIM-120 = 682 lbs DI = 0
2xWeapon Pylon = 562 lbs DI = +30
2xMk-84 = 4020lbs DI =+20Gives us a total weight of 32992 lbs. Drag index is 59. (Also, lets remember, on A-A WVR config with 2 missiles and 2 additonal emtpy pylons Drag index is 21)
F-16’s acceleration data from M0,79 to M1,25: (interpolating 32k-36k lb data for DI=0 and 50, 30k-34k for DI=100)
Drag index 0 = 53 seconds
Drag index 50 = 66 seconds
Drag index 100 = 90 secondsLinearly interpolating for M0,8-M1,2; F-16’s acceleration at 33000lbs is:
Drag index 21 = 52 seconds (with 2 wingtip missiles only.)
Drag index 59 = 63 seconds (with 2 wingtip missiles + 2 JDAMs.)While F-35’s acceleration is exact same as F-16 with JDAMs, F-16 do benefit from reduced drag when flying next to clean.
Feel like the acceleration discussion has been beaten to death. The F-35’s acceleration numbers are equivalent to an F-16 with a DI of 50-80 depending on weight. In fact, based on the numbers it looks like the performance threshold was based on an F-16 with a DI of roughly 50 at loaded weight. It misses this by 8 seconds, hardly slow.
Elements of power did a series of posts on this. Not going to say that he’s impartial, but the explanation is thorough and user friendly for those interested:
[ATTACH=CONFIG]241195[/ATTACH]
http://elementsofpower.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-f-35-and-infamous-transonic_22.html
FBWhttp://aviationweek.com/defense/f-35-customers-funding-us-based-software-update-labs
Other than the usual stoking of fears over foreign user sovereignty, this is an interesting article. Not to nitpick, but trying to compare timely updates of the Gripen’s threat database with the MDF’s is a stretch. The 12 MDF’s for the F-35 are twice as big as those on the F-22. It would be instructive to see just how much data is contained in the Gripen’s threat database by comparison
The questions raised over the MDF is interesting. There is a huge amount of data collected for each MDF. How they will be able to stay on top of updates is a critical question.
Here is a simplistic overview of what the MDF consist of:
http://www.scout.com/military/warrior/story/1593551-inside-the-cockpit-flying-the-f-35
Described as the brains of the airplane, the mission data files are extensive on-board data systems compiling information on geography, air space and potential threats in known areas of the world where the F-35 might be expected to perform combat operations, he explained.
Consisting of hardware and software, the mission data files are essentially a data base of known threats and friendly aircraft in specific parts the world. The files are being worked on at reprogramming laboratory at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., Air Force officials have said.
The mission data packages are loaded with a wide range of information to include commercial airliner information and specifics on Russian and Chinese fighter jets. For example, the mission data system would enable a pilot to quickly identify a Russian MiG-29 if it were detected by the F-35’s sensors.
FBWNo offense to Topspeed, but MS FSX sim discussions belong on a game forum, not an aviation forum. We have enough OT posts on most threads as it is.
Sign In
