F-35 Joint Strike Fighter News, Videos and pics Thread

Gloire_bb

Captain
Registered Member
4Gen, and 4++Gen alike are in lot of trouble in airspace where S400s etc populate, you really should understand this by now??
Polar bears-operated s-400? :eek:
Many of us view, what main reason behind direct replacement of f-15c is continious existence of russian long range bombers(and other cruise missile lobbers, like submarines).
It isn't a threat f-35 can be expected to deal with.
Neither archers nor arrows.

For 4+++ aircraft US are already going to have worlds' largest 5th gen force.
 

TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
thanks for reading my posts LOL
you know I don't believe much in your F-35 hype

could be kinda modern F-16 "eventually", but A-10 replacement common ... the USN part Feb 11, 2019

One Size Doesn't Fit All
No could be about it.
F35 is designed to take the F16's job and do it better. It's also already smoked the AV8B's job. And eventually will take the F/A 18C job. It's just that simple.

And "Eventually".... please there will never be another A10 because even the A10 cannot afford to do the job the A10 was designed to do the way people think it's done.
Fact more CAS missions are flown by F16s and F/A18 than A10, and also Fact more F16 And F/A18 return from there missions undamaged than A10.
Why? Because back when it was designed they had to build it to fly in the weeds, soak up as much fire as it could and limp home in a wing and a prayer.
Where as even as that was happening the ability to attack targets with precision even close to allied forces was available.
No one size doesn't fit all but as many have pointed out since what we got was not F35A, F35B, F35C but F35A, AV35B and F/A35C. These three aircraft are not all one they have divergences between them enough to justify them as different aircraft.

One size doesn't fit all? SU27, SU33, Mig 29, Mig29K.
Fact mission wise these all overlap between there conventional air force types and there Naval siblings.
F35 was not the first attempt here F16 tried to be the Tri service fighter before it. As did F111 and before that F4. The failures of these earlier types was boiling down to trying to fit a bomber (F111) into a fighters job. A Navy who really didn't want a light fighter so they walked out with the YF17 to make the F/A18.
Finally then there was the F4 Phantom that Worked across all three services!
 
this thread for
The US Air Force doesn’t want F-15X. But it needs more fighter jets.

40 minutes ago
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The U.S. Air Force
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. But it didn’t necessarily want the F-15X, and it didn’t intend to buy any
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, its top two leaders confirmed Thursday.

“Our budget proposal that we initially submitted
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,” Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told reporters during a Feb. 28 roundtable at the Air Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium.

Wilson’s comments confirm reporting by Defense News and other outlets who have reported that the decision to buy new F-15X aircraft was essentially forced upon the Air Force. According to sources, the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation Office was a key backer of the F-15X and was able to garner the support of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Asked by one reporter, point blank, whether the Air Force wanted new F-15s, Wilson and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein danced around the question.

“We want to buy new airplanes,” Goldfein said.

“We want to buy 72 aircraft a year,” Wilson added.

Air Force leadership has confirmed that, as long as current budget plans don’t change, it will request money for new F-15s in FY20. The service plans to purchase eight F-15X planes from Boeing in FY20, with an expected total buy of about 80 jets, Bloomberg reported Feb. 19.

It’s normal for the Pentagon to be intimately involved with each service’s portion of the budget — and even to overrule service leadership and move funding around to better support the White House’s aims — something that Wilson herself alluded to in her comments.

“The Air Force and each of the services put in their budget proposals, given the top line that we’ve been allocated, and then there are further discussions that include the potential for some additional funds throughout that process,” she said. “It’s not something that is an Air Force decision. Ultimately it’s a Defense Department budget, and it goes into an overall presidential budget.”

However, the potential F-15X buy has received increased scrutiny for a number of reasons.

For one, Wilson has been vocal in dismissing reports that the Air Force had been considering purchasing an upgraded F-15.

“We are currently 80 percent fourth-gen aircraft and 20 percent fifth-generation aircraft,” she told Defense News in September. "In any of the fights that we have been asked to plan for, more fifth-gen aircraft make a huge difference, and we think that getting to 50-50 means not buying new fourth-gen aircraft, it means continuing to increase the fifth generation.”

Additionally, when Bloomberg broke the news that the Air Force would buy new F-15Xs in December, it reported that the decision was pushed by then-Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive who has since become acting defense secretary. Shanahan’s spokesman has rebutted those reports, stating that “any DoD programmatic decisions impacting Boeing were neither made nor influenced by Mr. Shanahan.”

One official alluded to sustainment costs as being a critical factor in the decision to buy the F-15X over additional F-35 fighter jets.

Boeing has not disclosed its proposed F-15X unit price, with numbers from $100 million to less than $80 million having been reported by various outlets.

Gen. Mike Holmes, head of Air Combat Command, declined to comment on the cost per plane in a later roundtable, but said that some of the value of the F-15X proposal lays in the total ownership cost of the plane, especially when taking into account the expense of sustaining the F-35.

“There’s more to think about than just the acquisition cost. There’s the cost to operate the airplane over time. There’s the cost to transition at the installations where the airplanes are — does it require new military construction, does it require extensive retraining of the people and then how long does it take?” he said. “We’re pretty confident to say that we can go cheaper getting 72 airplanes with a mix of fifth and fourth gen than we did if we did all fifth gen.”
 
No could be about it.
F35 is designed to take the F16's job and do it better. It's also already smoked the AV8B's job. And eventually will take the F/A 18C job. It's just that simple.

And "Eventually".... please there will never be another A10 because even the A10 cannot afford to do the job the A10 was designed to do the way people think it's done.
Fact more CAS missions are flown by F16s and F/A18 than A10, and also Fact more F16 And F/A18 return from there missions undamaged than A10.
Why? ...
you tried hard to sound as if F-35 weren't meant to also replace A-10, while
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F-35A Lightning II

starts with Mission
The F-35A is the U.S. Air Force’s latest fifth-generation fighter. It will replace the U.S. Air Force’s aging fleet of F-16 Fighting Falcons and A-10 Thunderbolt II’s, ...
etc.
 

TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
Well Jura, I tried to point out A10 doesn’t do the mission the way A10 used to.
It’s a missile/bomb truck today. So yeah replacing it as a missile and bomb truck
 

Brumby

Major
Clearly the USAF intends to retire the A-10 asap if not for Congress. Unfortunately there are three key variables in the mix : politics; merit; and sustainment.

In terms of sustainment while the numbers are rubbery, it cost $12K/hr to operate an A-10 versus up to $68K/hr for a F-35. There is a valid argument of whether you need a F-35 to bomb a pick up truck if the A-10 can do the job. The main problem in my view and I don't think the USAF can fix is the high sustainment cost of the F-35. The F-35 brings to the fight significant capabilities but those capabilities carry high sustainment cost. The USAF position is that it can get those cost down but seriously can it?
 

gelgoog

Brigadier
Registered Member
The A-10 is a really cost effective bomb truck. The F-35 thus far is an economic disaster.
I also think it might get worse before it gets better. The aircraft is not far enough in its life cycle for us to know its foibles.
 
quote of the day comes from the acting Air Force Secretary inside
How the US Air Force’s Kessel Run team plans to solve one of the F-35 program’s biggest headaches
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:

“There is a logistics system that supports the F-35 called ALIS. It cannot scale. It has got huge problems. It drives the maintainers nuts. And so we put together a team of Lockheed Martin, Air Force programmers and maintainers on the flight line,” she said.
 
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