Anatomy of the JSF: A US$1Trillion Mistake

[Don1]

Isnt that typical or usual of Ben ,working things backwards...lol....fun and joke ..

Merry Cmas ..ites

Dat sound too Fishy

[Jawge]

Yuh tink mi happy say wi on di same side? truth is truth though.

[Jawge]

One thing is indisputable: there is not one shred of scientific evidence to support the china aerial superiority argument.

[Jawge]

Now yuh gone expose di man. Low him mek him climb high nuh. Cho

[Jawge]

but those presented by RAND above has nothing to do with aerospace but with math and computer science. Put the parameters in the computer code for the cylon's (see Battle star Galactica) space fighters and see if the US and China's fighters wouldn't be decimated.

You just don't have the hard data to back up your talk on the China jets. I doubt if China's has it either

[Don1]

LOL!!! Dis funny fi reel!! Man seh dis ave nutten fi duh with math! Mi belly!

Yuteman it has EVERYTHING to do with math. Aerospace is built on a foundation of math & physics. Every plane created today begins and is tested first and throughout the development cycle by mathematical modeling.

The ignorance on this subject is astounding

I've presented the peer reviewed research of EXPERTS in the field who have no vested interest in the outcomes of their technical analyses.

What have you and Ben responded with?

Nothing but inconsequentials, inaccuracies and inanities

Jawge it really look bad now... you prattle about math/science often.... please demonstrate a scientific approach backed by data if you wish to be taken seriously on this matter

Thanks in advance

[Don1]

Jawge ...stay on Earth... yuh gone a Mars now

No one has said China has "aerial superiority" as you loosely term it... what the experts have said is

1. One US plane yet to be operational, the F-35, tests as inferior to Russian and Chinese models in flight test...if you were familiar with the development histories and had an open mind you might understand....unfortunately neither condition obtains

2. Based on current aerospace trends and critical US missteps... the longstanding US air dominance is eroding and may disappear in the future if not addressed...the F-35 mistakes should not be repeated.

3. There is indisputable evidence that Chinese aerspace is rising at warp speed and is competitive in a few areas now... and this will probably intensify greatly in the future to full spectrum competitiveness

We know you genuflect to all things USA...that's ok... but when objective science is presented don't allow your idolatry i.e. emotionalism to overcome factual info by experts in the field

[Muadib]

Peer review of imaginary planes ?!

lol ! woiee ! Mi Ulna !

[Don1]

Argument ah mad yuh... the planes are flying today

Fi yuh incoherent yappin cannot compete wid expert analytics... wich part yuh get yuh aeronautical engineering expertise from?? Google University??

Woooiiieee mi cerebellum!!

[Time]

All RAND sight up di rake to ****

How the U.S. and Its Allies Got Stuck with the World’s Worst New Warplane




From all the recent sounds of celebrating coming out of Washington, D.C., you might think the Pentagon’s biggest, priciest and most controversial warplane development had accelerated right past all its problems.

The price tag —currently an estimated $1 trillion to design, build and operate 2,400 copies—is steadily going down. Production of dozens of the planes a year for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps is getting easier. Daily flight tests increasingly are hitting all the right marks.

Or so proponents would have you believe.

“The program appears to have stabilized,” Michael Sullivan from the Government Accountability Office told Congress. “I’m encouraged by what I’ve seen,” chimed in Air Force Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, head of the program on the government side. When War is Boring asked Lockheed spokesman Laura Siebert about the F-35, she said she expected a “much more positive” article than usual owing to what she described as the program’s “significant progress.”

But the chorus of praise is wrong.
The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — a do-it-all strike jet being designed by Lockheed Martin to evade enemy radars, bomb ground targets and shoot down rival fighters — is as troubled as ever. Any recent tidbits of apparent good news can’t alter a fundamental flaw in the plane’s design with roots going back decades.

Owing to heavy design compromises foisted on the plane mostly by the Marine Corps, the F-35 is an inferior combatant, seriously outclassed by even older Russian and Chinese jets that can fly faster and farther and maneuver better. In a fast-moving aerial battle, the JSF “is a dog … overweight and underpowered,” according to Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C.

And future enemy planes, designed strictly with air combat in mind, could prove even deadlier to the compromised JSF.

It doesn’t really matter how smoothly Lockheed and the government’s work on the new warplane proceeds. Even the best-manufactured JSF is a second-rate fighter where it actually matters — in the air, in life-or-death combat against a determined foe. And that could mean a death sentence for American pilots required to fly the vulnerable F-35.



The F-35's inferiority became glaringly obvious five years ago in a computer simulation run by John Stillion and Harold Scott Perdue, two analysts at RAND, a think tank in Santa Monica, California. Founded in 1948, RAND maintains close ties to the Air Force. The air arm provides classified data, and in return RAND games out possible war scenarios for government planners.

In Stillion and Perdue’s August 2008 war simulation, a massive Chinese air and naval force bore down on Beijing’s longtime rival Taiwan amid rising tensions in the western Pacific. A sudden Chinese missile barrage wiped out the tiny, outdated Taiwanese air force, leaving American jet fighters based in Japan and Guam to do battle with Beijing’s own planes and, hopefully, forestall a bloody invasion.

In the scenario, 72 Chinese jets patrolled the Taiwan Strait. Just 26 American warplanes — the survivors of a second missile barrage targeting their airfields — were able to intercept them, including 10 twin-engine F-22 stealth fighters that quickly fired off all their missiles.

That left 16 of the smaller, single-engine F-35s to do battle with the Chinese. As they began exchanging fire with the enemy jets within the mathematical models of the mock conflict, the results were shocking.

America’s newest stealth warplane and the planned mainstay of the future Air Force and the air arms of the Navy and Marine Corps, was no match for Chinese warplanes. Despite their vaunted ability to evade detection by radar, the JSFs were blown out of the sky. “The F-35 is double-inferior,” Stillion and Perdue moaned in their written summary of the war game, later leaked to the press.


‘Can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run’
The analysts railed against the new plane, which to be fair played only a small role in the overall simulation. “Inferior acceleration, inferior climb [rate], inferior sustained turn capability,” they wrote. “Also has lower top speed. Can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run.” Once missiles and guns had been fired and avoiding detection was no longer an option — in all but the first few seconds of combat, in other words — the F-35 was unable to keep pace with rival planes.

And partly as a result, the U.S. lost the simulated war. Hundreds of computer-code American air crew perished. Taiwan fell to the 1s and 0s representing Chinese troops in Stillion and Perdue’s virtual world. Nearly a century of American air superiority ended among the wreckage of simulated warplanes, scattered across the Pacific.

The designer of the F-16 says that the F-35 wings are too small and it will suffer the same fate as the F-105 because it cannot turn sharply and quickly. The bottom like is that planes should be designed to do one mission and any spinoff benefits must be secondary. The designer of the F-16 stood up to the pentagon and the military industrial complex and designed the aircraft to do one thing - win a dog fight. The result was the F-16 was the best dog fighter in the sky. You cannot design a jet that hovers and turns quickly.

1 - The Air Force version needs larger wings in order to win a dog fight.
2 - The NORAD/Canadian Air force versions will need two engines in order to fly safely over Canada's wilderness.

3 - The Navy version needs larger wings in order to generate more lift at slow speed.
4 - The Navy and Marine versions need two engines in order to fly safely over water.
5 - The Marine STOL version needs two engines in order to hover safety.

Maybe the best thing that they can do to save the F-35 use it as a ground support plane?

[Don1]

The designer of the F-16 says that the F-35 wings are too small and it will suffer the same fate as the F-105 because it cannot turn sharply and quickly. The bottom like is that planes should be designed to do one mission and any spinoff benefits must be secondary. The designer of the F-16 stood up to the pentagon and the military industrial complex and designed the aircraft to do one thing - win a dog fight. The result was the F-16 was the best dog fighter in the sky. You cannot design a jet that hovers and turns quickly.

1 - The Air Force version needs larger wings in order to win a dog fight.
2 - The NORAD/Canadian Air force versions will need two engines in order to fly safely over Canada's wilderness.

3 - The Navy version needs larger wings in order to generate more lift at slow speed.
4 - The Navy and Marine versions need two engines in order to fly safely over water.
5 - The Marine STOL version needs two engines in order to hover safety.

Maybe the best thing that they can do to save the F-35 use it as a ground support plane?

Finally an intelligent response amidst the barrage of laughs from the Ben & Jawge Show

Ground support planes need to be tough, armored and survivable from ground fire and have large caliber cannon as well

Unfortunately the F-35 has NONE of those attributes so it's totally unsuitable for that role... plus at $150-$200 Million a copy (depending on production run) it's unaffordable to be risked at low level support

Some experts believe the best thing to do is cut the losses and scrap the program... this may happen or it just may be drastically reduced like the F-22 was...and that's a far superior plane but again at ~$300m apiece that's unaffordable as well in the budget cutting era

The military is in a big quandary on the issue

[Muadib]

The planes are flying today ? Wheh dat mean ?

Please provide the operational data on the Chinese 5th Gen planes...

[Don1]

The planes are flying today ? Wheh dat mean ?

Please provide the operational data on the Chinese 5th Gen planes...

Operational data?? LOL!!!

Yuteman fi yuh Google U education inna Aeronautics fi Dummies cyaan hangle dat type ah analysis... yuh waan bun out yuh likkle circuit dem??

Woooiiieee mi cranium!!

[Willi]

Quit with te specious. Di man never said anything about air superiority.

Did you know the MiG 29s was faster than anything the US had, BUT the F15-16 and 18 were more manouevrable and more deadly? The US always had air superiority and that was a badge of pride. After $1T madness spend, they are on the verge of losing that? This when pickney a starve in the US. Yes right yasso in na Philly, my wife's best friend is volunteering in homeless food banks and yessideh she seh it bad out deh! She had no idea how bad. Some schools a give out free food bags in nearby NJ on Fridays and Mondays its 100% attendance guaranteed! The pickney dem walk like zombie and are largely unwashed.

Contrast this to the abominable $1T spend for air inferiority. Sick mi stomach!

[Willi]

Clinton sold the Chiney one bag ah missile tech. Other prez will do the same as they all have the same bosses who pull strings behind the scenes.

Life is a stage and we are mere actors in it...except for the few powerful directors.