Yup… cost overruns are pretty much routine.
Yeah, seriously. The Navy doesn’t take single-engine lightly. I recall they did an exhaustive study on using a single engine before signing off on the F-35.
Doesn’t change that the F-35 is a fucked up plane for a lot of reasons. The lifetime operating costs of the fleet alone (maintenance and fuel and parts) is going to be over a trillion dollars. They should have ditched the goddamn VTOL version; if I recall, the Marines rarely use that capability on the Harriers, anyway.
We used to design, build, field, and retire entire fleets of airplanes in the time it’s taken to get the the F-35 built. It’s crazy.
For pity’s sake, Canada was really going to spend $45 billion for a fleet of F-35s? It’s certainly nice of them to support Lockheed Martin so generously.
Increasingly, after the end of the Cold War took away the plausibility of a true World War III-esque struggle of the titans, high-end aircraft procurement seems to be driven mostly by economics and politics (not that those were ever far from the center of the mess to begin with).
Not very far at all. We started WWII with a lame air corps due to politics and graft, for example. Even in ancient Rome there was a lot of corruption associated with the military.
I am not a Swede, but it seems to me that most anything you can do with one F-35, you can do a lot better with the two or three Gripens you could get for the same cash.
This was not cost overruns. The Canadian government claimed they were going to pay 75 million per aircraft at a time when the US DoD had already assessed the cost as being over 150 million per aircraft. Not only that but one of the main arguments in favour of a single engine jet over a twin engine jet was that it’s more cost effective to take that 2nd engine and stick it in a 2nd airframe so you have more planes overall… Ignoring the fact that the high cost of the F-35 means we would to shrink our fleet by 20% before even “cost overruns” were taken into account.
It’s a boondoggle, and an especially irritating bit of dishonesty and bad behaviour from our shitty “conservative” government.
But it looks really cool. And Canada was really sold on the whole ‘stealth is binary’ thing (you have it and win or don’t have it and die), even though that’s mostly a load.
For a single engine jet they are very, very loud. Be glad you aren’t getting the B model, in STOVL mode it is even louder. They are so loud the Navy is buying new headsets for all the maintainers. They are also a lot bigger in person than you may think…easily the same size as a Super Hornet. Still a bit smaller than the late great Tomcat. Louder than the Tomcat though.
Will they be “better” than (fill in the blank)? Who knows, I don’t support that program. I know the whole Trillion dollars!!! thing is overblown, some funky non apples to oranges math going on from what I have heard. I too busy working on stuff for Skynet to dig into that. A lot of good folks are wringing these jets out.
They’ll probably be basing them here in Burlington, VT, where there has been a big kerfluffle over whether or not they should transition the Vermont Air National Guard from F-16s to F-35s. Lots of local debate, mostly over noise issues. The F-16s are pretty loud for folks in the flight path as it is, but opinions differ.
Article today that Canada is looking at buying the Super-Hornet.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet reportedly discussed the issue last week, and while no formal decision was taken, one top-level official said: “They have made up their minds and are working on the right narrative to support it.”
So an intentional leak to gauge public reaction. The narrative will probably borrow from Australia in that it is an interim measure until a new competition can be arranged which will include the F-35.
Don’t forget the military pilots as well, who view drones as beneath them. Drones are so much more cost-effective and safer (to the pilots)
Do you honestly believe that military pilots have a very significantly pivotal role in high-end aircraft procurement? They’re obviously involved in design and testing, but the executive decision is probably not something they actually impact, as a coherent collective. The comment with respect to drones seems like a irrelevant jab. The F-35 seems like a boondoggle for a number of reasons, but it isn’t because drones can easily fill the designated role of the F-35.
Yeah, it will be quite a while before drones can replace piloted aircraft for general-purpose air combat. Because of the obvious drone vulnerability to jamming and hacking. A high-tech foe will not stand for drones being used against them when they can disable them with a powerful transmitter or even take them over if there is a flaw in the encryption or even a human intelligence breach that reveals some keys.
I expect even after they become available fully autonomous drones will not be allowed in the near term due to fears about targeting. Even if people reasonably argue they are more or less the same as cruise missiles with programmed targets. Conceivably there will eventually be a compromise allowing them to attack only targets designated by humans before their launch. But limiting an autonomous drone to only attack previously known targets would prevent them from serving in air superiority roles, though perhaps some strategic ground attack roles would be plausible. Eventually people will probably get over fears of autonomous military drones running amok, though. And then we’ll really be in trouble :)
There’s an interesting article in today’s Daily Beast about future fighter procurement, titled “The Air Force May Have Built Its Last Fighter Jet.” The premise is that air defenses are easy and cheap to develop, but fighter-based air superiority systems are neither. The USAF is now focused on drones and electronic penetration capabilities.
One thing about that article is that I think he kind of missed a key point, despite kind of accidentally mentioning it a few times.
He points out that enemy anti-air is growing increasingly dangerous, and that is without question true. However, that’s kind of exactly why the F-35 is so critically important. Any non-stealth fighter like the F/A-18 is basically just going to be a target in the future.
I think the poi to the article is that things like the F-35 take so long to go from design to active service that they are already vulnerable to advanced enemy defenses on day one of service.
Timex is right. Part of the USAF’s strategy for penetrating advanced IADSs is stealth.
Bear in mind, too, that drones are not a panacea: you need a radio link. Having a radio link over a hostile position requires that your radios be better than hostile jamming. In the Donbas, where Ukraine is fighting Russian proxies, the Russian EW forces have been able to enforce more or less complete communications blackouts on the Ukrainians. It takes a lot of trust in your drones and radios to claim that they’ll be invulnerable to that sort of interference.
The stealth fleet provides the US Air Force its preeminent capability, and no country will want to mess with that for awhile. But, stealth is not a binary either. I think the point is that it may be cheaper to shoot down any given aircraft than to build one and train its pilots, so the economics ultimately work against it.
Edit to remove direct link - image of Serbian poster “we didn’t know it was invisible”:
They got 1, not 3. Plus, it was due to sloppy execution on our part as much as anything (re-using the same strike lanes over and over again, perfect nighttime conditions for being spotted, etc.)
And it was 1st gen stealth technology that was 20 years old at the time.