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

As I watched the seemingly endless string of F-35Bs take off

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earlier this week, I was struck by how routine it all seemed.

During eight days of flying, the F-35Bs flew 108 sorties, racking up 85.5 hours, deputy Marine Commandant for aviation, Lt. Gen. Jon Davis, told us on the phone this morning, conceding it was “a low number of hours, really, because the jets were light-loaded…” Low hours, maybe, but that’s the first time these planes were put through their paces in anything like regular military circumstances.

Routine is not what we’ve come to

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over the last decade. Instead, we’ve thought of overweight planes, ballooning costs, design flaws, unresponsive companies (Lockheed Martin), balky software and magic sensors that just didn’t seem that magical.

But on the phone today the head of Pentagon acquisition, Frank Kendall, told reporters in a conference call from Norway that “there’s a fundamental change in our direction.” Instead of making basic fixes to basic parts of the aircraft, Kendall made clear, the focus is now on manufacturing planes in greater numbers, completing testing, deploying aircraft, training maintainers and pilots in numbers and developing concepts of operations for war and peace.

“The minister of defense of Norway kicked off our meeting, and he used a phrase I’m going to quote. I think it describes pretty well where we are right now,” Kendall told reporters. “‘We’re turning the future into the present.'”

That seems consistent with what senior Air Force and Marine officers are saying about their versions of the F-35. Davis told us Tuesday on the USS Wasp that he’s already focused on full production. Ditto

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, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, who told me earlier the Air Force is planning for full production.

So what does this mean? “We’re turning our focus much more towards fielding the program, upgrades in the future and getting whatever efficiencies we can going forward,” Kendall said this morning.

He announced a “bulk buy” program for the U.S. and Joint Strike Fighter program international partners to procure up to 450 F-35s over three years, with 150 bought each year. This is not a multi-year purchase, which is subject to explicit congressional approval. It still needs an OK from the Hill, but this is similar to the purchases made by the Navy of the Virginia-class submarines. If appropriators OK the money, and authorizers do not oppose it, it can go through.

Finally,

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coating applied to the USS Wasp deck successfully handled the incredible beating from the 40,000 pounds of thrust from the F-35B engine. The coating, though there were visible scorch marks, “performed to standard,” Davis said. “But,” he went on to note, “there’s more work to do.”

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Jura said:

found this info about testing:
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Test pilots for the Marine Corps' highly anticipated next generation jump jet recently slugged it out in simulated aerial fights off the Eastern seaboard as part of the aircraft's first round of operational testing.

Marines with three squadrons aboard the amphibious assault ship Wasp flew dozens of sorties a day at the stick of the F-35B, the service's next generation short-takeoff, vertical-landing fighter that will replace the AV-8B Harrier and EA-6B Growler.

The sea trials, which ran May 18-29, put the aircraft to the test in a real-world environment just weeks before it could be tasked with crisis response or attack missions. The first F-35B is expected to his the fleet in July.

During testing, pilots were tasked with launching simulated attacks on each other or intercepting aircraft attacking the ship. The 'dogfights' showcased the aircraft's technology, which is far more advanced than legacy jets. The F-35 has more sophisticated stealth and electronic warfare capabilities — all in a single airframe.

"When you put together the stealth with the situational awareness, with it being connected to all the other airplanes, with the information sharing — this airplane is going to be pretty darn hard to beat," said Maj. Michael Roundtree, one of the test pilots with Marine Fighter Attack Training Squadron 501 out of Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, South Carolina.

The pilots noted the aircraft's ability to provide "unparalleled situational awareness" through its advanced sensor system, including a $400,000 helmet. The helmet displays all flight data on its visor, allowing pilots to fly without glancing down at their instruments. It also feeds streaming video from an array of six infrared cameras around the aircraft, providing a seamless 360-degree view.

When paired with the aircraft's communications capabilities, F-35 pilots have unprecedented awareness of their environment, Roundtree and his fellow pilots said. Maj. Richard Rusnok, the F-35B detachment officer in charge for Marine Operational Test and Evaluation Squadron 22, declined to offer specifics on the aircraft's classified radio system, but said pilots can communicate with the ship each other without using radios. The system, which is shrouded in secrecy, allows pilots to silently and seamlessly divvy up targets.

The next step in proving the aircraft will involve live-fire weapons testing in Arizona.

"We have a lot of weapons for each pilot to drop, a lot of missiles to shoot in June and July," Walsh said.

While still in the early stages, the F-35 won't have its full arsenal of weapons capabilities until additional brackets are added to the aircraft in 2017, according to Davis. Still, some of the Corps' first F-35s could be called on for real-world missions before then.

The Corps will orient its F-35 fleet toward the Asia-Pacific region as the Air Force focuses on Europe. By 2017, the Marine Corps will have two operational F-35 squadrons, one of which will be relocated from Arizona to Japan. Other future stateside F-35 squadrons will also rotate through Asia on six-month intervals as part of the Unit Deployment Program.

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Jeff Head said:

Do you have any kind of link to this? Where the USS Wasp will deploy to Westpac next year as a Carrier as opposed to an LHD?

With 16 F-35Bs, she will be operating as a Marine carrier with very little, if any, Air Assault or Amphibious assault.

...and if that is so, they will be using her to test those F-35Bs in very real world conditions.

Personally, with only IOC this year, and at the level it will be at...I think such a deployment is premature.

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The U.S. Defense Department is considering ordering as many as 450 F-35 aircraft from Lockheed Martin Corp., sending warplane output to the fastest in three decades as it gains confidence in the advanced fighter’s performance.

While the plan would require U.S. lawmakers’ approval, the so-called block buy wouldn’t face the same congressional scrutiny as a multi-year procurement. That’s typically the stage at which an aircraft leaves the development phase and enters full-rate production.

The purchase would total 150 jets annually over three years and would include aircraft destined for international customers, Undersecretary Frank Kendall told reporters during a conference call Friday from Norway, where he was attending an annual meeting of F-35 customers and producers. The deal could potentially yield “double-digit” savings, Kendall said.


That rate would be “far more than the world has seen for any combat plane since the 1980s,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace and defense analyst with Teal Group, a Fairfax, Virginia-based consultant.

The Joint Strike Fighter is intended for use by the Air Force, Navy and Marines, along with sales to U.S. allies. Output has held steady at around 35 a year while the jet undergoes flight-tests and Lockheed and its suppliers debug software and boost engine reliability. As the production tempo increases, the cost of making each jet should fall from $108 million to about $80 million by decade’s end.

Lockheed Martin fell 1 percent to $188.20 at the close in New York as broad U.S. stock indexes declined.

Hard Questions
Using block buy authority instead of the multi-year procurement process to buy three years’ worth of F-35s would allow defense officials to avoid Republican Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a frequent critic of cost overruns on the fighter program.

“McCain is not likely to try and kill the program but he would ask a lot of hard questions and perhaps make it very difficult,” said Robert Levinson, a Washington-based analyst with Bloomberg Government. “A block buy does not require permission in a defense authorization bill, only in appropriations legislation.”

The deal probably would include all the jets for fiscal year 2018 through fiscal 2020 in the Pentagon’s latest five-year plan -- a request for far more money than the law allows, Levinson said in an e-mail.

Signing the block buy would effectively “wall off the F-35 program from the rest of the DOD budget, and would increase budget pressure -- ‘uncertainty’ -- on other weapons systems and contractors,” he said.

U.S. officials are “very encouraged” by progress on the $391.1 billion F-35 fighter program, the Pentagon’s costliest, said Kendall, the Defense Department’s chief weapons buyer.

The first F-35 jets for the Marine could be declared ready for combat as early as July, he said.

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Brumby said:

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)
Refer to the last sentence in this article. The source itself is note 11 but if you click its link gets you an error code to that webpage. The note description seems to suggest is from janes.com. Btw, 2017 is not next year.

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Jeff Head said:

Wikipedia is sometimes a very dubuious source IMHO...oft times I find that the references just do not pan out.

In this case...I will wait for a definitive reference.

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Jeff Head said:

Wikipedia is sometimes a very dubuious source IMHO...oft times I find that the references just do not pan out.

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Brumby said:

Did some further research. This is as official as it gets taken from the 2015 Marine Aviation Plan and I quote "The AVPLAN now prioritizes F-35B sourcing to MAGTF (MEUs) in the PACOM AOR with the first VMA transition (VMA-211) planned to begin FY16 .The pace of the AV-8B conversion has been accelerated and F-35B will source 31st MEU requirement beginning 3QFY17. (Source : 2015 Marine Aviation Plan : TACAIR 2030 ROADMAP 2.4.2)"

We know that the 31st MEU is the only permanently forward-deployed MEU, and is America's expeditionary force-in-readiness in the Asia-Pacific region based out of Japan.


According to the same document.
The F-35B and F-35C will replace F-18, AV-8B and EA-6B. The Marine Corps will procure a total of 353 F-35Bs and 67 F-35Cs in the following squadron bed down:
•9 Squadrons x 16 F-35B
•5 Squadrons x 10 F-35B
•4 Squadrons x 10 F-35C
•2 Squadrons x 10 F-35B reserve
•2 Squadrons x 25 F-35B FRS

It would seem the plan is to equip each of the 9 LHD with a squadron of 16 F-35B's unless I am missing something.

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Jeff Head said:

Yes.

But each squadron is based land side...and an element of the squadron (six aircraft) is usually all that is deployed to sea at any one time on he LHDs.

Earlier, the statement that got the juices going was that the Wasp itself would be deployed with 16 aircraft in 2017. I believe most of us took that to mean that there would be 16 aircraft deployed on the Wasp.

I have seen no indication of that...and I now believe that it is simply a mis-understanding of having a squadron forward deployed, versus what goes to sea.

I have no doubt that by 2017 they plan to deploy a squadron forward based in Japan.

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