Air Force Grounds $400 Billion F-35s Because of 'Peeling and Crumbling' Insulation (washingtonpost.com) 193
An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes the Washington Post:
Less than two months after declaring the controversial F-35 Joint Strike Fighter ready for combat, the Air Force on Friday announced that it was temporarily grounding 15 of the jets after it discovered that insulation was "peeling and crumbling" inside the fuel tanks. The setback is the latest for the $400 billion system, the most expensive in the history of the Pentagon. The problem comes as the program, which for years faced billions of dollars in cost overruns and significant schedule delays, had begun to make strides.
The insulation problem affects a total of 57 aircraft, the Air Force said, 42 of which are still in production... In a statement, Lockheed Martin said that "the issue is confined to one supplier source and one batch of parts." It emphasized that "this is not a technical or design issue; it is a supply chain manufacturing quality issue..." It is unclear how long the aircraft would be grounded, how long the problem would take to fix or what the larger affect on the program would be.
âoeWhile nearing completion, the F-35 is still in development, and challenges are to be expected," said an Air Force spokeswoman, adding "The F-35 program has a proven track record of solving issues as they arise, and we're confident we'll continue to do so."
The insulation problem affects a total of 57 aircraft, the Air Force said, 42 of which are still in production... In a statement, Lockheed Martin said that "the issue is confined to one supplier source and one batch of parts." It emphasized that "this is not a technical or design issue; it is a supply chain manufacturing quality issue..." It is unclear how long the aircraft would be grounded, how long the problem would take to fix or what the larger affect on the program would be.
âoeWhile nearing completion, the F-35 is still in development, and challenges are to be expected," said an Air Force spokeswoman, adding "The F-35 program has a proven track record of solving issues as they arise, and we're confident we'll continue to do so."
Conventional warfare is dead (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Conventional warfare is dead (Score:4, Insightful)
That's newspeak for "this program had an abnormal amount of bad problems."
Also good news that the total cost diminishes with time, 1 trillion to 0.4 trillion in two years time. By 2018 it will be for free.
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Just another new lawn dart. It's going to replace the F-16 as the worst fighter in the arsenal.
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are you implying the F-16 is currently worst fighter in US arsenal OR that when it replaces F-16, it'll be the worst fighter in US arsenal?
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Both.
Re: Conventional warfare is dead (Score:5, Funny)
10 years ago, i'd have burst your bubble with facts and combat stats. these days, i'm just gonna check if kids are asleep yet and eat a sandwich.
Re: Conventional warfare is dead (Score:4, Funny)
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The best thing about the F-16 is it was and is cheap. The F-35 doesn't even have that.
Re: Conventional warfare is dead (Score:5, Interesting)
I hear this often as a complaint against cost plus contracts but I believe that people do not understand why such contracts are necessary.
The US government, or any government really, needs stuff that simply cannot be obtained on the open market. This is especially true if you want to keep things secret, companies that go bankrupt tend to not keep things secret for many reasons. If the government makes a contract at a set price then no company in their right mind would sign off, it would simply be too much risk.
A lot of companies will sign a contract for a product knowing it will be a loss because they are gambling that the product can be sold at a profit to subsequent customers. This is often how new passenger aircraft will get built. The first person to buy such an aircraft will get a deep discount knowing that they are experimenting. They hope the costs of working out the bugs will be offset by their discount. Later customers for the aircraft will pay a higher price, and do so willingly, because they are getting an aircraft that is proven to be of value.
This also works for passenger aircraft because there is a larger number of airframes to spread development cost over. There were about 1500 F-15 fighters built but over 9000 Boeing 737 passenger and freight airframes built.
When building a military aircraft you have only one customer, and no means to make a profit if that customer backs out. If the government wants someone to build anything for them, and only for them, then they will have to make a promise of a profit for that company.
I know someone is just waiting to point out that the F-35 has a dozen "customers" but that is a moot point here. Of the approximately 2000 F-35 airframes ordered the US government will buy 1800 of them, this is effectively no different than if the US was the only customer.
I'm sure Lockheed just loves these "setbacks" because it makes them a profit. Forget the fact that setbacks make it that much more difficult to get future contracts. Forget the fact that setbacks distract from other potentially money making efforts. Forget the fact that even a big "evil" corporation that builds "killing machines" has people that work for them and people don't like to see other people die because the product they produced failed to protect their lives.
I really need to stop replying to anonymous cowards but I could not let this go by for some reason.
Cost Plus (Score:2)
Plus many times materials will be cost plus and labor fixed price.
For example, I have worked to upgrade the network infrastructure at numerous small sites. We don't get to do a site survey before bidding so the materials, which vary a lot will be cost plus, and we only make a minimal on the hardware, and the labor is fixed price.
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>> Forget the fact that even a big "evil" corporation that builds "killing machines" has people that work for them and people don't like to see other people die because the product they produced failed to protect their lives.
That's wrong. In the case of killing machines, other people will live if you do a bad job !
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I'll put Godwin's law into effect...
Are you saying more people would have lived if the Allies had inferior weapons in fighting the Nazis? Sure, let's give the "good guys" weapons that fail to work properly and are just as likely to kill the operator as the target. That will certainly save more lives. Because the "bad guys" will simply die from laughter at the sight of their adversaries committing suicide en masse.
Idiot.
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I watched the video you linked to and I see that the F-5 and its derivatives were fine aircraft. Its development proves that in some cases a successful fighter aircraft can be designed without a cost plus contract.
What sets the F-5 apart from the many other successful fighter aircraft was its size and cost. This was able to be built and tested by Northrup on spec because they had a low cost aircraft with a high probability of sales. A lot of the development costs were already sunk from previous aircraft
Re: Conventional warfare is dead (Score:5, Insightful)
The Fed will never end a massive pork barrel project like this, so suggesting they "could" is unreasonable and very inaccurate. "Could" that has a very low chance effectively means 0.
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According the Mars-One project At 400Bn we would have sent 398 people to Mars.
6Bn for the first, then 4Bn for the rest.
Why are we budgeting to fight for a line on a piece of dirt when we could be fighting over planets instead?
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http://www.mars-one.com/faq/fi... [mars-one.com]
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Don't worry. As soon as they find oil on Mars, they'll change their tune.
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The Fed canceled the F-22 program early, which was also a massive pork-barrel project like this... So "Could" is far more likely than you imagine.
Re:Conventional warfare is dead (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody cares if that pig flies as long as its pork fills a few barrels.
Future warfare (Score:4, Informative)
Future wars will be fought with pilotless (and maybe even autonomous) vehicles.
Some will, some won't. You won't see large scale remote operated vehicles between major powers because they have one huge weakness - namely they can be jammed. They're useful against third world countries with limited military resources. I wouldn't have nearly so much faith in them against a major power like Russia or China. Autonomous fighting vehicles are not only not ready for combat yet, it's not clear that they are a good idea at all for a host of both practical and ethical reasons. Even if they manage to deal with those concerns adequately (and I doubt they will) we're still quite a long ways from having practical autonomous weapons platforms. (If the phrase "autonomous weapons platform" doesn't scare you there is something wrong with you)
Cyber warfare will also be much more devastating than whatever damage this overpriced toy can produce.
Not any time soon. Maybe someday but that day is a ways off. Right now bombs and missiles have a lot more power to shut down the infrastucture of a country than any hacker. Go to Syria and tell me how much damage has been done there with just conventional weapons versus hacking. The difference isn't even close and it's likely to remain that way for quite some time to come. Cyber warfare can cause some serious problems but it's a rather awkward way to kill them in any meaningful numbers.
We should dock the pay of every congress critter who voted for it until it's paid back in full.
Good luck with that.
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We've been deploying autonomous attack vehicles for 70+ years. The V2 was autonomous. ICBMs are autonomous. Cruise missiles are autonomous. Barage balloons are autonomous. Even gps/laser guided bombs are autonomous. Radar/IR guided surface to air and AA missiles are autonomous
If you need a vehicle to fly to a place, dump a ton of munitions and fly back we can handle that pretty easily. Even Air to Air combat is now handled by AI. http://magazine.uc.edu/editors... [uc.edu] There are no sensors that a h
Funny definition of autonomous (Score:5, Insightful)
By your definition a bullet is autonomous. once an ICBM is launched or a JDAM is released you cannot change its target. Just like a bullet.
A truly autonomous weapon is capable of evaluating the on-going/changing situation and selecting the best target and attacking it, none of your examples is capable of this.
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The humans aren't there for their sensors. The OODA is observe, orient, decide and act. The humans are mostly there for the decide and act portions. i.e. where to aim and when to shoot.
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Even if they manage to deal with those concerns adequately (and I doubt they will) we're still quite a long ways from having practical autonomous weapons platforms.
Mainly because we got no good way to tell or separate friend from foe, military from civilian, hostages and human shields from fighters and terrorists. But in a real war you nuke Hiroshima killing 20k+ soldiers but 70-146k civilians, one in four to one in eight is good enough. We have a lot of weapons that can act autonomously on a "if it moves, shoot it" basis that we wouldn't use today but would still be a lot more discretionary than nuking a city. I expect the next major war to be full of kill zones, if
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no, but it has a Lightning connector
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Cyber warfare will also be much more devastating than whatever damage this overpriced toy can produce.
I don't follow, perhaps you have a different definition of cyber warfare than what I am familiar with. The kind of cyber warfare I know of attacks certain kinds of infrastructure, communications, and electrical supplies. Which in most every case would be annoying, not deadly.
We've all likely read about or seen in movies about how someone was able to "hack" into some control system and caused physical damage. Any reasonably designed system will not allow a remote user to do anything that can cause permane
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Drones may work well against unsophisticated opponents with minimal resources (the only place they've been used so far). But I have a hard time believing that they would be effective in a real war, one with opponents that have sophisticated jamming & vast resources.
I used to think that way, too, and then I saw a computer beat a 9-dan Go player within an inch of his life.
Time to change your mind.
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A computer can be reprogrammed by the enemy. If they figure a way to do it for that model they can switch all those airplanes around. Humans are harder to turn.
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Cruise missiles and ICBMs have their mission set before launch. The whole point of fighters (and drones) is that they don't - otherwise, just use a missile. Until SkyNet is ready, we'll be flying drones remotely, and that means jamming and EMP are issues.
Civilian deaths are acceptable as long as they aren't ours
This has been true for every war in history, but we've actually tried a little to minimize this recently. The fact that civilians still inevitably die in war isn't some great failing of the system - war just sucks. It's good to do what we can, but also
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Ever seen Eye in the Sky? It's worth a watch.
Humans are in the loop for a reason - to judge the value of the target vs the cost in civilian casualties. Given we want to minimize the latter, perhaps we don't want to activate SkyNet just yet.
Plus there are Many kinds of drones with very different capabilities, and we need to combine the information fro them to make the right call. Even with SkyNet - jam those comms and you can't do that.
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even one cruise nuke on Russian soil would have sent the message
I'm not sure what message you intend to send, but the one that's received is "America broke treaties first", and that opens the morality floodgates. Any other nuclear-armed military can then feel free to launch their nukes, in defense of their Russian ally against the suspected ally of the evil USA.
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[As] it is, the US failed to back up an ally.
In the political arena, Ukraine is not really an ally with any binding need for the US to react. The whole affair was between two sovereign nations with no American involvement.
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Ukraine was never part of NATO. China already tried to invade Vietnam in the late 1970s and failed.
Re: Conventional warfare is dead (Score:5, Interesting)
A modern Tomahawk cruise missile has an inventory cost of around $750,000. Once you use it, you have to replace it at full cost.
An F-35A's flight cost is around $40,000 per flight hour (google exactly what a flight hour is) and is expected to fall to around $30,000/fh in due course.
A 5 hour mission designed to hit 5 targets means 5 Tomahawk missiles expended, at a cost of $3.75million for the mission.
The same mission for the F-35A would cost, currently, $200,000 in flight hours, and $135,000 for 5 Mk.82 bombs with JDAM kits - a total mission cost of $335,000.
The mission cost difference is a saving of about $3.4Million, give or take.
So, with a current purchase cost of $98Million for a LRIP (low rate initial production) F-35A, it would only need to fly 30 or so missions to be worth while, over the cost of continually buying expendable cruise missiles to carry out the same missions.
How does that work out in real life?
During the second Gulf War air campaign, there were 20,753 combat sorties by coalition aircraft, during which they used 18,467 smart bombs and 9,251 dumb bombs.
That war, if fought by using cruise missiles solely, would set you back $20.8Billion just to replace your expended ordnance.
Take the aircraft costs out of the equation for a moment - replacing all those expended munitions with JDAMs would cost $748Million, leaving a balance of more than $20Billion to cover the operating costs of the aircraft...
You could buy a fleet of 100 F-35s and operate them for just under half their entire projected life on the balance alone...
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The B52H can deliver 20 times the dumb bomb load with only a 55% higher cost per flight hour. If you're looking at cost per pound of bomb delivered, that's impossible to beat. The same can be said, mutatis mutandis, for other loads.
Given the types of wars in the future, cheap cost per bomb delivered is best for conflicts with nations with inferior defenses, and no-coming-back blast-them-to-hell tactical nukes for others. It's the only deterrent that will work with the Russians and Chinese, given that NATO
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If the enemy has Soviet radar and SAM equipment from the 70s and 80s, which is now available readily and cheaply to anyone with a grudge against the USA, a B52H can deliver approximately 0 times the bomb load of any modern stealthy aircraft, with a 55% higher cost per flight hour before disintegration.
That's why the LRS-B program started, to build the upcoming B-21.
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You ought to try reading TFA. The long-wave radar might be able to detect that something's there, but it's the modern computation power that might possibly be able to identify the particular signature of a new plane, rather than raising alerts for every bird or chaff that happens to be in the vicinity.
That means it's not going to be a part of the old weapons systems. Only major powers like Russia or China would likely be able to use the technology on a battlefield, and they're unlikely to enter a direct ope
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They don't need to identify it immediately. Knowing something is there, they can direct much more powerful radar at that spot to help determine what it is. I think it's there in the article, but it's definitely being used in conjunction with "normal" radar by the Russians.
Also, since they're cheap to make, it's easy to deploy decoys to make you waste your anti-radiation missiles. Plus firing them give a pretty good clue as to where you are. They're either carried internally, in which case your stealth isn'
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Or another likely situation is US gear from the 90's or later from someone overrunning a former ally or a change of government (Saudi, Indonesia, Phillipines, Pakisan etc) - or buying the same from China (eg. classified targeting system in tanks stolen by criminals in Israel in 2000, sold to China then onsold to Iran).
Very thin skinned types may play the an
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Those were 1950s-1960s air defense systems defeated in the 1980s. Back in Vietnam they caused enough damage to the USAF and they also caused damage to the Israelis in the Yom Kippur War. Eventually they figured out how to effectively counter them. Still a system like that was used by skilled operators to knock down an F-117 in Serbia in the 1990s. Which resulted in an early retirement of that aircraft model. It remains to be seen how's the performance against more modern SAM technology.
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That war, if fought by using cruise missiles solely, would set you back $20.8Billion just to replace your expended ordnance.
You cited quite a few numbers but you left out the biggest one of all, which is the cost of the pilot. Depending on what source you refer to, it takes anywhere from $6M/yr to $10M/yr to train a single combat pilot. This is why pilots get in more trouble for heroically nursing a crippled aircraft back to base than for ejecting at the first sign of smoke. They are worth more than anyt
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Cruise missiles don't have to be guided. And when was the last time we had a war directly between two major powers?
The Russians showed just how effective a cruise missile campaign can be in Syria. The Russian KH-101 stealth cruise missile (max range 5,500 km / 3,400 miles, with a rumored maximum of up to 10,000 km, nuclear variant KH-102) wasn't hampered by range constraints. The Chinese also have them. You don't need an F35 for countries like Syria, and they will be shot down on approach in wars with Chin
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An unguided cruise missile is a tactical disaster in a modern war. They are only useful against civilian or very large military targets, because they can be blown off course by wind or other interference, and lack the course-correction a guidance system would provide. If you're a belligerent like Germany in WWII, you can happily point them at your British enemy and watch the civilian casualty count rise as their morale falls. Unfortunately, if you're at least pretending to follow the rules of ware (as almos
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...That's a guided cruise missile, then. In modern parlance, an "unguided" cruise missile is something like the old German V-1, which would travel a certain distance in a certain direction, then fall and blow up where it landed, but had no practical ability to correct its course during flight beyond basic stabilization.
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I have never wished for mod points more than I do now. I wish I could set your face on fire, with my mind.
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Give it time :(
We've had plenty of people the Russians support getting bombed by us (such as in the last 24 hours) and plenty of people we support getting bombed by the Russians. It's only a couple of fuckups away from someone intervening in one of the situations and air to air combat.
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Even in light of this, we're self congratulatory! (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a piece from CBS
Lt. Col. David Berke says there's no comparison between the F-35 and today's jet fighters.
David Berke: I'm telling you, having flown those other airplanes it's not even close at how good this airplane is and what this airplane will do for us.
David Martin: We have planes that are as fast as this.
David Berke: You bet.
David Martin: And can maneuver just as sharply as this one.
David Berke: Sure.
The Russians must be laughing!
The F-35's radars, cameras and antennas would scan for 360 degrees around the plane searching for threats and projecting, for example, the altitude and speed of an enemy aircraft, onto the visor of a helmet custom-fitted to each pilot's head.
They have had this technology in their SU-30s for at leat 4 years!
Re:Even in light of this, we're self congratulator (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate the f-35, waste of money. But... that's a little bit disingenuous.
Modern fighter jets are not rated solely on speed and manoeuvrability. Range, ceiling, avionics, weapons and all the rest are what make it a proper piece of kit. Dogfighting is low on the list of priorities in 2016.
The Russians are laughing all right, but this is way down the list. I bet invading the Ukraine with almost no repercussions has them grinning widely. Trump expressing his willingness to ditch NATO probably has probably garnered a few giggles as well.
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The coup displaced a Russian lapdog. Eastern provinces were invaded by Putin's little green men, the same ones that stole the Crimea back again and shot down that airliner.
Why should Syria be run by a two-bit dictator who only has the allegiance of about 15% of the country, Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia? That's a cast just as bad as Al-Nusra.
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SU-30 is a single prototype.
From abroad (Score:2)
Not the same (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked on A-10s back in the early 80s. What a gorgeous, well-designed bird. Almost no real flaws. The old aviation companies were actually better. Republic, Fairchild, McDonnell Douglas, you name it. There is a reason why the F-16s and F-15s are still the backbone of the Air Force. Nothing else comes close. Likewise, nothing touches the A-10 for its intended role, and the Air Force cannot wait to get rid of it. Yes, the air frames are old, but the avionics packages are updated constantly, as are the engine parts and other critical pieces like stabilizers, etc., are fabricated in shops on various bases. The A-10 is the king at ground support.
Methinks the military is trying so hard to design and develop a do-it-all bird they are not seeing the forest for the trees. The US military has the unfortunate habit of using birds designed for one thing try and fulfill other or all roles. They want this bird to DO IT ALL. This rarely, if ever, works. Hence the F-16 and F-15 are still kings of the sky.
Case in point is the Republic F-105, likely the best light bomber the Air Force ever had. It was developed in the 1950s to quickly run nukes into and out of Europe. Had an internal bomb bay. It was the largest and fastest jet of its type when it went live in the inventory. Vietnam came around and they used it for bombing runs and dogfighting (something it was not designed to do). The F-105 carried more than a WWII B-17. They ended up using them as Wild Weasels, a role for which they excelled. Still my favorite AF bird ever.
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I don't think the military is trying hard at all to develop a do-it-all bird. In fact, I doubt most of the military cares, including the Air Force where they are far more interested in unmanned vehicles and cyber. JSF is a congressional project for money re-distribution. The portion of the military that cares about doing important things like winning wars, moved on from JSF a long time ago. It is a boring, uninteresting program.
Re:Not the same (Score:4, Interesting)
As to drones, a significant portion of the AF is fighting them, pilots like flying and with more drones you get fewer seats for the pilots to sit in. Guess what the majority of the generals did as young officers, bingo they flew fighters.
Once you get to be a Colonel you rarely fly but the ex-flyers are the ones that get promoted most often. Hell even a couple of the Cyber commanders were fighter pilots. You read that right not Computer guys but fighter pilots.
Times change (Score:5, Interesting)
All the base level Fab shops are shutdown, manpower cuts. Fab work is done at depot or outsourced to contractor facilities. Sucks when you are in-country.
The A-10 is a simple, single purpose bird. Really good at one job, destroying ground vehicles. The Army tries to tell us that the choppers are just as good until you tell them they aren't getting any A-10 air support. The USAF has never been fond of the close air support mission, not very glamorous.
The bean counters always think a multi-purpose bird makes fiscal sense, that is until you actually try to build one. It works better to build a single purpose aircraft, the F-15 comes to mind then modify the basic airframe for other missions. AKA the F-15E.
Worked at the 682 ASOC supporting ROMAD/TACP and ALOs.
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Agreed.
The A-10 and the F-15 are arguably the two greatest airborne weapons platforms ever built. They have long, well-proven track records showing that pound-for-pound no other pair of aircraft can match, period. They worked so well that we had to dream up some ridiculous bullshit reasons to replace them.
Time and time again the A-10 has shown that it is the single most effective ground support plane ever built, and the F-15 is still patrolling the skies shooting down everything that's dumb enough to fly up
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The multipurpose F-35 is slightly CHEAPER than the single-purpose F-22.
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So, you are saying maybe the F-35 isn't quite the money pit the detractors claim?
I am not a fan of multi-role/multi-service aircraft in general, jack of all trades/master of none kind of thing.
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I take no stance on that bigger issue, never having really dug into the details. However, it's obviously that switching to single-purpose craft isn't the magic incantation that will fix all the problems.
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I hope so. It has a single engine instead of two.
Golden Rule (Score:3)
"The F-35 program has a proven track record of solving issues as they arise, and we're confident we'll continue to do so."
Funny, isn't it? If you throw enough money at most problems, they go seem to go away! From almost start to finish, this "program" has been an exercise in "work richer, not smarter".
One Plane (Score:5, Funny)
We are getting close to having a one plane military.
Law Number XVI: In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3-1/2 days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Something I saw 1st hand there... apk (Score:4, Interesting)
See subject: While working @ Lockheed Martin coding. Each day I had to pass thru a hangar (accompanied by a Colonel, who by now must be retired) where they were working on all types of planes (some in 'clean room' type settings) - he noticed I'd look over @ the far end of the hangar each time we passed. He inquired why. I told him I was looking @ a sign there that said:
"Do your best work: Our young men & women's lives ride on it".
This affected me personally since my brother is an officer in the military (about to retire though). I don't want him to die, let alone due to shoddy workmanship!
He then said "Look kid, get used to one thing - the ONLY reason we got this contract was because we're the lowest bidder & build crap - that's how the REAL WORLD really works - so do NOT believe that sign!"
To which I was astounded (especially considering how much money they had available considering it's nigh limitless from taxpayers - you'd think they'd have Quality Control assuring that wouldn't happen... they don't).
So he took me into a troop carrier type plane & showed me the stud metal frames that were supposed to have iirc, 16 rivets each & instead, only used like 8. This was how they were able to do it, pinching pennies cutting corners.
* I was NEVER the same after that & it was in 1996 - very VERY early in my career professionally in computers.
I took off after that job was done & instead decided to work for things other than the military industrial complex (i.e. - I jumped to Bell South to work on the 1996 Atlanta Olympics project to allow their workers to do what is common place now via remote desktop (except we used Windows NT & Citrix (Pentium I 133mhz laptops & 32mb of RAM each, powerful machine then) via IBM Thinkpads into an Ascend Gateway via 56k dialup modems (they said it couldn't be done but myself & some DEC engineers made it work so they could work from home during the traffic jams to go into downtown Atlanta to work) - this was a better more noble effort than building war machines imo, especially ones built VERY subpar)...
APK
P.S.=> Money truly is the root of evil in this world - so much so, they don't give a flying "f" (pun intended) if our soldiers ride on junk... apk
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"Do your best work: Our young men & women's lives ride on it".
This affected me personally since my brother is an officer in the military (about to retire though). I don't want him to die, let alone due to shoddy workmanship!
He then said "Look kid, get used to one thing - the ONLY reason we got this contract was because we're the lowest bidder & build crap - that's how the REAL WORLD really works - so do NOT believe that sign!"
* I was NEVER the same after that & it was in 1996 - very VERY early in my career professionally in computers.
I bet you that sign actually mean something back in the 40's, 50's, 60's and maybe the first half of the 70's. Before the Dark Times. Before the Age of MBA and Accountants making decisions.
Key takeaway's (Score:2)
The key takeaways from this article are: ...said an Air Force spokeswoman. ...The F-35 program has a proven track record of solving issues as they arise. Wow!! That instills a lot of confidence in F-35's.
On the Inside? (Score:4, Interesting)
Insulation on the inside of the fuel tanks? Who puts insulation on the inside of a fuel tank?
Reading between the lines, it is probably an anti-corrosion coating, not some foam or fiberglass.
There's really only one product on the market for this, from ATFI [slashdot.org], and the company relies upon knowingly upon falsified data-analysis to make the sale. ATFI bragged about their contract as a subcontractor to the F-35 in a press release a year or two ago . . .
Looking today, I see that ATFI has disabled their RSS scroller, and has disabled their previously-functioning link NEWS [atfinet.com] menu-link at the top of their website.
Huh. No better way to show that they are the guilty party, eh?
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I don't think its really intended for insulation, though it probably has some insulating properties. From what I can gather it is some kind of foam that is intended to prevent tank fires, fuel sloshing and as part of the aircraft leak prevention measures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-sealing_fuel_tank
Sealing the fuel feed? (Score:2)
From what I can gather it is some kind of foam that is intended to prevent tank fires, fuel sloshing and as part of the aircraft leak prevention measures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]i
So it's a foam that (among its functions) seals leaks.
And it's peeling off the inside of the tank.
If a piece of that gets sucked over to the fuel feed it should seal up that "leak" pretty effectively. Then again, if it gets sucked into the fuel line it might seal the engine's injectors, or the fuel filter.
Any of those cou
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They put insulation inside fuel tanks with racing cars too, for several reasons.
I found the patent for the airplane version: here [google.com].
These jets are ready for hand-to-hand combat (Score:2)
MF'ing Lockheed... (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_external_tank
Who you NOT gonna call when getting your fuel insulated. (internal OR external)
Nothing to see here, folks (Score:2)
F16 was the only fighter to fight the trend (Score:3)
Col. Jim Burton's "The Pentagon Wars" is back in print. While the Kelsey Grammer/Carey Elwes comedy movie is focused on their reluctance to test the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, much of the book is about the development of the F-16 by the "Fighter Mafia" - Col. John Boyd, Pierre Sprey, Chuck Finney, and designer Harry Hilliker - and how how hard they had to fight to get the F-16 built and accepted.
The F-16 hate in this forum could be coming from the 3- and 4-stars that wanted another standard Pentagon product: twice the weight and twice the price of the aircraft that came before it. But the F-16 was lighter and cheaper than the F-15 and focused laserlike on the job of dogfighting.
The F-35 has finally gone as far as you can go in the other direction: multi-multi-purpose, does everything, but the weight and especially the cost are almost comically bloated.
The question is not whether an F-35 could beat an F-16: it's whether a billion dollars of F-35 could beat a billion dollars of F-16s. And that's not even up for discussion.
Of all the of bogus excuses for the F35, (Score:2)
this probably isn't one of them.
Bad components happen. When Washington Roebling was building the Brooklyn Bridge he discovered that the cable contractor had cheated by supplying sub-standard steel. He was faced with a decision: rip it out and start over, or leave the bad cable in place. He chose to leave the bad cable in place because his design was robust enough to afford him that choice. And mind you, this was at the time the most advanced, most technically difficult bridge ever constructed. To this da
Re: F-35 is an amazing airplane! (Score:2)
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Stealth sucks when there are multiple radars from different aspects, or using longer wave radar that stealth can't hide from.
Or radar systems where the transmitting and receiving system are separated: Those shapes are all about sending the radar signal anywhere BUT back where it came from.
(Or is that what you were talking about when you said "multiple radars from different aspects"?)
Of course the shapes are really good at their intended reflect-it-somewhere-else mode. (The engineers knew they had it right
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As an engineer I understand how a "track record of solving issues" works. You only get competency points for resolving an unexpected issue when you deliver the project on time.
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I suppose it's easy to rack up a lot of fixes if your design supplies a seemingly never-ending stream of problems...
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That's different.
Failing early/often is building technological stretch into your project plans. Every project should contain some reach, something where success is not 100% guaranteed, because if you're too easy on yourself you get sloppy. You should build a little stretch into every project if you can, and budget for the possibility of failure.
As long as your project delivers the key things the customer needs on time or near as dammit, those are useful failures. Failures that take your project well past
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"Combat Ready" is being used in a highly contrived way. It does NOT mean any of the following things:
(1) That the system works like it is supposed to.
(2) That the system in its current state is ready to provide a valuable set of capabilities in any real situation.
(3) That you would even remotely consider operating the system in its current state in a hostile environment.
What "Combat Ready" means is that it meets a set of criteria designed, Texas Sharpshooter [wikipedia.org] style, around the system's current progress. Yo
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s/or/and/g
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You are using the UK as an example of a place that can design electrical systems for cars, I have a TR-6 in the garage that would like to talk to you.
The Germans designed some of the worst carburetors know to man, look under the hood of an Opel GT some time.
And the French, Peugeot owners would like to talk to you.
GM and Ford have their issues but so do most of the Europeans.
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Opel is GM.
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My MGA and MGB would like to suggest to you that, either you are exaggerating, or your car has suffered at the hands of one or more DPOs before you bought it (hopefully, you are not someone else's DPO).
In any case, don't blame the designers of the electrical systems. Blame the buyers at BL who would not pay for better quality electrical systems.
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The engineering might have been good but Lucas was and is infamous for low quality parts on the TR series. Jaguar and Land Rover are also notorious for electrical problems, power windows and seats especially.