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

TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
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So now for the 64 dollar question?? (that does date us, doesn't it?) when the F-35 Bravo is all cleaned up and transitioned to forward thrust, lift fan door down and locked, does that lift fan continue to spin at a high rpm, or is it taken off line, only to spin up as the forward lift fan is "unlatched"...
Where's my money?
The lift can is mated to the turbine by a clutch system. When in fixed wing flight that clutch disengage so the fan slows down the doors close and the is no longer a factor.
As to the doors open the upper door on the lift fan as can be seen in the image I just added would act as a Air break
 
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Air Force Brat

Brigadier
Super Moderator
View attachment 51312
Where's my money?
The lift can is mated to the turbine by a clutch system. When in fixed wing flight that clutch disengage so the fan slows down the doors close and the is no longer a factor.
As to the doors open the upper door on the lift fan as can be seen in the image I just added would act as a Air break

I think Bob Barker has it?? so do you have a source for the sequence, so the lift fan spins to a stop, only to be reawakened once the transition is initiated by the clutch re-engaging...

post a picture or video if you find one, or a source explaining this whole process..
 
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Lawmakers Concerned Push for F-15X Is Reducing F-35 Procurement

which it is, isn't it
Connecticut lawmakers are urging Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan to maintain steady procurement of the
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in the next budget cycle even as the Defense Department signals interest in investing in the
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.

"We write to express our alarm regarding recent reports that the Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2020 budget request will only include 78 F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets -- six fewer than projected in last year's forecast numbers," said the letter, signed by Connecticut Democrats Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Rep. Chris Murphy and other members of the Connecticut delegation.

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that the DoD will ask for 78 Lightning II fifth-generation fighters in its 2020 request instead of the 84 projected last year. Citing a source familiar with the request, Bloomberg said the
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is on track to buy its scheduled 48 fighters while the service considers the opportunity to buy into Boeing Co.'s new F-15X program. That means the
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or
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has scaled back its intended F-35 procurement, Bloomberg said.

The lawmakers
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the reduction will slow engine production for the Lockheed Martin Corp.-made F-35. Pratt & Whitney manufactures the jet's F135 engine at facilities in East Hartford and Middletown, Connecticut.

"The F135 engine is affordable and adaptive, delivering unmatched advances in safety, design, performance and reliability," the lawmakers wrote. "The F-35 program employs over 11,000 Connecticut constituents -- directly and indirectly -- with 78 first-tier suppliers and other statewide suppliers that provide parts to primes."

They continued, "We are prepared to work with our colleagues on a bipartisan basis in the FY 2020 budget cycle to -- once again -- secure full funding for the game-changing F-35 to ensure that our warfighters have the most capable, lethal, and stealth fighter fleet."

The letter to Shanahan comes as the Pentagon is preparing to lay out how the F-15X might fit into its inventory.

Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told reporters at the annual Air Force Association Air Warfare Symposium in Orlando, Florida, last week that the service needs to boost its fighter inventory but had not expected to do so with the F-15X.

"Our budget proposal that we initially submitted did not include additional fourth-generation aircraft," Wilson said,
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.

"We want to buy 72 aircraft a year," she said. On Feb. 19, Bloomberg said the Air Force will request funding to buy eight F-15X jets.

Wilson confirmed speculation that the procurement was forced on the service. The move will marks the first inclusion of a new F-15 in the Air Force inventory in more than 20 years.
 

Air Force Brat

Brigadier
Super Moderator
Easy button
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The three parts with Bacon.



The origin of the 3 bearing Swivle in the US. Convair 200/201View attachment 51313View attachment 51314

Awsome, Terran and thank-you, apparently the forward drive shaft is "clutched" at the aft entry point of the drive shaft to the lift fan, beautiful, and the three bearing nozzle is also brilliant, whats fun is listening to the chief engineer who came up with the lift fan concept on the F-35 explain the idea of the drive shaft and nozzle in laymans terms.

The pilot has to engage the clutch to the lift fan,,,, I'd like the see the lever and mechanism that accomplishes that? the door unlatch must be built into this system, and it must be latched, if it were to open at supersonic speed it would likely tear the airplane apart??

So I'd like to see the cockpit mechanism for the lift fan clutch?? anybody, and thanks Terran, that's a lot of good information in a few short video's
 

Air Force Brat

Brigadier
Super Moderator
No lever push button.
Basically if you drop the fighter to a low speed and altitude you push a button the bird transforms. That was one of the big deals the Marines and Brits wanted Harrier is a nightmare to fly. They wanted this to fly its self.

Good job Terran, and thank you so much!
 
Mar 1, 2019
...


my conjecture is the F-35 on-board diagnostics is at last-century level, so it can't cope with something THAT over-overgineered, but can't be upgraded either
now
Key piece of F-35 logistics system unusable by US Air Force students, instructor pilots
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The
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has proven so clunky and burdensome to work with that the U.S. Air Force’s instructor pilots, as well as students learning to fly the aircraft, have
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, Defense News has learned.

The Autonomic Logistics Information System, built by
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, was supposed to consolidate training, maintenance and supply chain management functions into a single entity, making it easier for users to input data and
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throughout its life span.

ALIS has been a disappointment to maintainers in the field, with updates coming behind schedule and many workarounds needed so it functions as designed. But the Air Force’s F-35A instructor and student pilots at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, and Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, were so disappointed with the performance of ALIS’ training system that they bailed entirely, confirmed Col. Paul Moga, commander of Eglin’s 33rd Fighter Squadron.

“The functionality in ALIS with regards to TMS — the training management system — was such a source of frustration and a time waste to the instructor pilots and the simulator instructors and the academic instructors that we at [Air Education and Training Command] in coordination with us [at Eglin] and Luke made a call almost a year ago to stop using the program,” Moga said during a Feb. 26 interview.

Moga said the command’s F-35 training squadrons are “not going to start using TMS again until it works.”

So in the meantime, F-35A training squadrons have adopted a legacy system, Northrop Grumman’s Global Training Integrated Management System. GTIMS is used by the Air Force, Army and Navy across a number of aircraft inventories to manage training schedules and cut the man-hours and costs associated with doing that work, according to a Northrop fact sheet.

At this point, GTIMS provides a more agile, efficient user experience than ALIS’ training management system, Moga said. But it doesn’t sync with ALIS, so pilots and instructors must do “double data entry” so that each system has a record of flight records, currencies and qualifications.

Even with that headache, using GTIMS is worth not having to deal with ALIS, he said.

“It’s not optimum, but it’s a lot better than it was before just relying solely on TMS,” Moga said. “Because between us and Luke, we couldn’t take any longer having instructors saying: ‘It takes me 45 minutes just to have access to a grade sheet, let alone fill it out.’ ”

The list of problems with ALIS goes back years, with the Pentagon’s independent weapons tester regularly pointing out deficiencies in annual reports. But the Air Force is just starting to get vocal in its exasperation with the system.

At the Air Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium held last week, Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson turned it into a punchline, jokingly saying: “I can guarantee that no Air Force maintainer will ever name their daughter ‘Alice.’ ”

The line got a lot of laughs.

ALIS, Wilson said, was “a proprietary system so frustrating to use, maintainers said they were wasting 10-15 hours a week fighting with it … and looking for ways to bypass it to try to make F-35s mission-capable.”

It’s unclear whether any of the other U.S. services have followed the Air Force’s decision to abandon ALIS’ training management system.

While the Marine Corps does use TMS, it also uses legacy systems like the Marine Sierra Hotel Aviation Readiness Program, or M-SHARP, as well as Advanced Skills Management, said Marine Corps spokesman Capt. Chris Harrison.

A request for comment was not immediately
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.

In a statement to Defense News, a spokesman for Lockheed Martin said the company is investing $180 million in ALIS and other data systems through 2021. The company is also working to modernize the ALIS architecture and improve data integrity, speed and automation.

“We’ve heard direct feedback from the user community regarding the Training Management System and are working to improve it. The newest version of TMS contains functionality and user experience improvements, including the ability to customize flexible training plans. This is being fielded in the latest ALIS 3.0 upgrade and we continue to improve the tool in 2019,” Lockheed spokesman Mike Friedman said.

Life with ALIS

On the maintenance side, ALIS is improving … very slowly.

Tech. Sgt. Joshua Wells is an ALIS expediter for the 33rd Fighter Squadron. One of two people in the squadron with that title, his entire job revolves around helping maintainers and support personnel use ALIS, and ironing out problems with the system that might occur throughout the day.

Wells takes a pragmatic view on ALIS’ performance. He calls it “a great tool for researching prior maintenance as opposed to digging through hundreds of thousands of pages” of documentation, and said the latest software update in January has led to some positive changes.

The speed of the servers is improving, but only so many ALIS users can use the system simultaneously. At a certain point, a user may have to wait for someone to log off before moving forward, he said.

Certain parts on the aircraft have a time limit at which scheduled maintenance or a replacement must take place. The latest ALIS update has sped up the time taken to process that data, “but we still have hiccups,” Wells acknowledged.

Users also continue to see challenges with gaps in the technical data that follows each part or subsystem, like the ejection seat. A 2018 report by the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation noted that Lockheed’s subcontractors on the F-35 do not always input information into ALIS in a standardized way, as they do not use the system. The Air Force has specifically said this problem can cause missed sorties and is one of the top five drivers of non-mission-capable rates.

“They are way better than where they were,” Wells said of the data gaps, adding that he has to call Lockheed Martin personnel “significantly less” for help getting data than he used to with older versions of the system.

While the Defense Department hasn’t spelled out a cohesive plan for ALIS’ future, there are signs the system could change in significant, fundamental ways in the coming years. Naval Air Systems Command, which manages F-35 contracts across the department, put out a solicitation in January for “ALIS Next,” which it envisions as a Lockheed Martin product that “will re-design ALIS in accordance with current information technology and software development best practices.”

The Air Force is beginning to look at that problem through its Mad Hatter effort, which pairs coders from its Kessel Run software lab with F-35 maintainers at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada.

Currently, Mad Hatter’s developers are building apps that will — hopefully — help to make ALIS more efficient and user-friendly, such as an app to expedite the creation of maintenance schedules. Users at Nellis will then test that app and provide feedback, shaping it into something customized to their needs.

But perhaps even more importantly, the Mad Hatter project has begun the process of hosting ALIS on the cloud, which will allow developers to “triage” code so that what is good and usable is separated from bad code that needs to be reworked, said Will Roper, the Air Force’s top acquisition official.

“There is good code there, but it’s good code in a fairly bad user interface and a bad architecture — bad in the sense that it’s 1990s technology and we’re in 2019,” he told Defense News in February.

“As they go through the code, think of it as apps in a smartphone, knowing that it’s an old phone that needs to improve. So we’re eventually going to ditch the ’90s flip phone, re-host on a modern smartphone, and we want to know what apps are pretty good to use, what apps can be used in part with reuse, and what things we need to recode,” he said. “It’s early, but so far a lot of the code appears reusable down at the app level.”

Despite all the problems, Wells is hopeful that the system will continue to improve. When this reporter asked if ALIS’ problems were just growing pains, he gave a resigned laugh.

“Long growing pains, but yes,” he said.
 

anzha

Senior Member
Registered Member
“We deliver an F-35 center fuselage every 36 hours and I am very proud to say we have made all our deliveries since the inception of the program,” said Frank Carus, vice president and F-35 program manager, Northrop Grumman. “Our dedicated team works closely with the customer and suppliers to improve quality and affordability in support of the warfighter.”

Designated AU-18, the 500th F-35 center fuselage is for a conventional takeoff and landing variant for the Royal Australian Air Force. Northrop Grumman began production on the AU-18 center fuselage in June 2018 and completed work on Feb. 21. Northrop Grumman has been producing center fuselages for all three F-35 variants since May 2004.

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Brumby

Major
This is not specifically F-35 but Red Flag in recent times seem to be synonymous with it.

The final mission scenario of Red Flag and what transpired.

After refueling at night over a southern-Nevada dust bowl called Texas Lake, scores of U.S. and coalition warplanes crossed into contested air space on a mission to suppress state-of-the-art enemy air defenses. The formation was soon bombarded with warning signals as radars of advanced surface-to-air (SAM) missile batteries with the reach of Russia’s S-300 and S-400 air defense systems switched on.

Electronic jammers struck as fighter pilots tried to communicate with an E-8 Joint STARS command-and-control aircraft; rear-area command cells had satellite linkages disrupted by cyberattacks. Starbursts of
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flashed on the ground below, and cockpit alarms warned that the formation was being painted with multiple radars from enemy aircraft with paint schemes and capabilities designed to replicate the likes of the advanced Sukhoi Su-30 Flanker fighters in the arsenals of both Russia and China.

Because this was the final mission in
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, however, the “Blue Force” pilots did not panic when confronted with a coordinated attack by Red Force Aggressor Squadrons operating in all domains – air, ground, space and cyberspace. Working in tandem, fifth generation F-22 Raptors and F-35 Lightning aircraft escorting the Blue Force formation exploited their stealth and speed to close quickly with the most immediate threats. The F-35s used their unprecedented sensor suites to gather, fuse data and distribute a common picture of the threat array to other aircraft. Fourth generation F-15s, F-16s, F-18s and British Eurofighters used that targeting data to launch beyond-visual range missiles and bomb strikes on SAM sites as strike aircraft proceeded successfully to other enemy targets. The simulated warfare felt surprisingly real in the cockpits of warplanes traveling at supersonic speeds.

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