The Commanche and the Albatross

[blackeagle603]

so instead we basically get a billion dollar A-7 with some upgraded electronics. Instead of dozens of Super Hornets for the same money.

[Greg]

Guess I'd better look up some more info on the Rafale.

At the moment, though, I am studying the U-2. Well, not so much studying it as resisting the urge to throw my career development course book off a bridge. I'm supposed to be upgrading to avionics craftsman; you'd think I'd know what positions an ON/OFF switch has. Whoever wrote this thing was desperate to make working the U-2 sound way more complicated than it could possibly be.

Well I shouldn't overstate Rafale too much. French technology does have an alarming tendency to cost more and perform less than advertised, while *looking* cool. The serious advantage the French appear to have over us right now is mainly sanity, as in contact with reality (which is very ironic) and a sense of the possible (and desirable... and affordable, etc).

We have distinctly better technology, what we seem to lack is any idea what it's *for*. A slightly larger Mirage F1 with a working (i.e. American) engine and radar, in the mid 60's would have been a world beater. As it is, F1 was a demonstration that even with backwards technology the French of all people could design a 3rd gen fighter that wasn't an embarrassing barge. Distinctly unlike *us*. Imagine what a Rafale-like fighter with superior American technology might do. Hey, it might do something other than sweep our decks and flight lines clear of aircraft, finishing the job that A-12 started....

When you scrap *existing* aircraft and remove capability from your existing force, in order to fund development of a new aircraft that may never be produced at all, you are doing something seriously fucking wrong.

[Greg]

Oh and while I'm busy spreading the negative waves....

WRT our enemies developing stealth aircraft, it wouldn't be the first time one of our enemies did something MONUMENTALLY stupid by simply copying us, assuming we knew what we were doing. Like Buran....

Anyway, the Russians seemed to have learned something from that one. While wanting to see what this stealth stuff is all about, they're being pretty careful to do it with India's money. While China's approach to stealth 'research and development' seems to be to do a fuckload of espionage, then build a prototype or two based on the latest haul to see if there's anything to it....

[randy]

The airshow tricks are just retarded, basically they're talking points and marketing checkboxes.

Back during the early 90's I was at an airshow with one of the first MIG-29 demonstrations in the US. After listening to the hype of it's maneuverability, especially the "cobra maneuver", I wandered over to where the pilots were talking to the public. I mentioned to one of them something like it would be neat to see them go back up and replicate their display with a combat load of fuel and munitions. He suddenly had to go back across the rope barricade away from the crowd.

[Jericho941]

The F-16 was designed to "smoke the F-15"? He clearly can't meet a design goal either, then!

No, seriously, he started losing me there, and when he got sidetracked off of wherever he was going with the high-low concept, it was only downhill from there. More on that later.

[NVGdude]

I think, given a choice, the Marines would be happy to have nothing whatsoever to do with the F-35.
It was shoved upon them as "this, or nothing" solely to buff up the Navy's buy-in, all done to placate some (hopefully long-since retired) project officer dipshit at the USAF, and some DOD a-holes who thought one airplane for every service was a great idea.

Nobody in the USAF thinks this thing is a good idea. It's being forced on us by the Navy to get the numbers up.

We'll take more F-22s.

The problem is that the USN has screwed the pooch on every single LO platform available. See the A-12 for starters.

[blackeagle603]

The F-16 was designed to "smoke the F-15"? He clearly can't meet a design goal either, then!

Absolutely -- after the close and into a turning fight. Just like a Scooter could give a Turkey fits once in close contact.

[Jericho941]

Upon re-watching, it seems pretty clear to me that this guy's mad that the F-35 is supposed to replace his baby, and puts that before all other considerations like common sense and coherence. You may wonder why I'm about to spend a whole lot of words picking this guy's statements apart when I think the F-35 needs to go away. Well, it's because he's wrong, and on the Internet. Also, he stepped on my dong.

That whole high-low mix idea was an Air Force PR concoction to make up an excuse -this was actually from the seventies, can you believe this, it shows you how long dumb ideas persist-

He never does get around to explaining what about this is a bad idea.

it was in the seventies, the Air Force, the apple of its eye was the F-15: Two-engine, great big fighter for its day, close to 50,000 pounds, super-big radar, all the bells and whistles the Air Force could think of. Which is exactly what they wanted: Big expensive airplane.

He would notice the F-15's radar, wouldn't he? Probably because it's awesome and the F-16's was a bad joke, but anyway. A big fighter for its day? Let's take a look at some contemporary loaded weights off of everyone's favorite source for Internet arguments, Wikipedia:

F-16: 26,500 lb
MiG-23: 34,612 lb
MiG-29: 38,581 lb
F-4: 41,500 lb
F-15: 44,500 lb
MiG-27: 44,800 lb
Su-27: 51,650 lb
F-14: 61,000 lb
MiG-25: 80,952 lb
F-111: 82,800 lb

Well, damn. Compared to an F-16, just about everything short of a Cessna 172 looks unreasonably heavy. But even though Sprey's rounding skills suck, among its contemporaries, the F-15 is resoundingly median for its day in terms of weight.

I like how he talks about "all the bells and whistles the Air Force could think of," implying it was overburdened with unnecessary junk, when one of the main points of building the F-15 was to make the thing the ultimate air-to-air fighter and nothing else. "Not a pound for air to ground," etc.

Colonel Boyd and I and Colonel Riccioni had worked on it, had gotten disgusted with it because it'd gotten too loaded up with junk. And so we went off and as kind of bureaucratic guerillas underground started the F-16. Which was gonna be less than half the size, half the cost, and much hotter. It was gonna just wax the F-15 by virtue of being smaller and hotter, and designed specifically for that mission, and not designed to carry a bunch of junk. A bunch of complex electronic stuff that had no relevance to combat.

God, what a chodesmith.

Soooooo... what? What was unnecessary on the F-15? Fuel? What electronic junk? Radar? Could it be... TEWS? All things that the F-16 has since been modified to have a fraction of so it's worth at least one quarter of a shit? There's no getting around the fact that it's only got one engine, though.

Well, you made a dinky single-engine jet fighter with the world's smallest cockpit resulting in a serious interface bottleneck, and avionics too overburdened with keeping the lawn dart in the air for the five minutes of fuel it has to do anything, at least besides making sharp turns. Oh, but as soon as you put an ECM pod on it to make up for that deficiency, it can't do its vaunted 9G dogfighting. Well, at least you succeeded in making it relatively cheap so we can use them as half-assed Wild Weasels without incurring a noticeable loss when they get shot down or simply run out of gas. Way to wax the F-15, Sprey.

He never gets back to it, but the high-low concept meant you'd buy as many F-15s as you could afford and pad their numbers with F-16s to put enough jets in the air to deal with the massive swarms of Russian fighters. I'm sure he took the notion that his baby was meant to be a bullet sponge for the F-15 a bit personally. Well, it only hurts because it's true.

The Marines have this mindless passion now, recently, for vertical takeoff airplanes, ever since they got the British Harrier.

Yeah, I don't get it either. A mild digression:

The "S/VTOL obsession" has to do with owning a mission set that includes "seize and defend advanced naval bases", as well as expeditionary ops in third-world shitholes where convenient pre-built foot-thick 10,000' long runways and hardstands are rather scarce. This prospect apparently scares the Air Force and makes Naval aviators queasy when the landing surface isn't pitching and rolling, whereas Army rotary-wing and Marine aviators in general seem to do just fine with it. S/VTOL is only a luxury if air support is too. The Marines, being ground-focused, think it's a pretty good idea, going back to about the 1930s.

The Marines have also never actually applied their Harriers this way, and they can't. They won't be able to with the F-35, either. V/STOL aircraft are too complex and maintenance-intensive to actually operate that way. A nice little site with fuel bladders and ammo doesn't help you much when you're code three for HUD and ECS. Battle damage? Forget about it.

With current and near-future technology, designing a jet that is both a modern, competitive fighter and can take off and land from dirt is a fool's errand. Even the Russians gave up on that one, and crappy runways are what they expect.

For other fun adventures in making aircraft that take off and land like helicopters but fly like airplanes, see also: V-22 Osprey.

In dogfighting, it's hopeless. You can guarantee that a 1950s designed MiG-21 of French Mirage would just hopelessly whip the F-35.

The real reason it's hopeless in the case of the V/STOL version is its pathetic armament when stealthy. When helmet-mounted cueing systems/HUDS and HOBS-capable missiles are all the rage, the F-35 has, bar none, the best HMCS. Which it can then use to defeat maybe four enemies if it hasn't already expended all its weapons, at which point it's defenseless if it does not have a gun pod mounted and/or it's as unmaneuverable as he says.

We didn't take HOBS seriously until Germany reunified and we got to play with MiG-29s, where we realized it didn't matter how good you are at turn-and-burn if the other guy only has to turn his head instead of his whole airplane to kill you.

(On CAS) You have to find really difficult-to find camoflaged targets ... you have to carry a large gun, say like the A-10, and you have to be able to stay in the vicinity of the troops for 4-6 hours...

This is one of those moments where you want to pull your hair and yell "STOP HELPING"

1.) Camoflaged targets. Really, the F-35 should be just as good at it if not better than any other fast mover we have on this one. Honorary mention in this category: A-10. As in, no better or worse than the others.
2.) Large gun: Sort of. You absolutely do not need a GAU-8 for antipersonnel or even light vehicle use, and modern armor can withstand the GAU-8. You do need a slow and stable platform to maximize your results, however, and firing bigger HEI rounds means you don't see infuriating bullshit like some guy on a dirt bike disappear in a cloud of 20mm bursts and reappear on the other side unharmed. While a GAU-8 is still great for ruining the day of everything short of an MBT (which it will thoroughly inconvenience through destruction of anything mounted on the outside), the 25mm gun should be plenty of gun for CAS. The real drawback is that there's no way in hell the F-35 will carry enough ammo for it.
3.) Not even the A-10 can loiter for that long. It WILL need to hit a tanker somewhere in that 4-6 hour period unless you double- or triple-bag it with external tanks.

The F-35 uses far too much gas, it's lucky if it can hang around for an hour, an hour and a half at most.

That's... fairly typical, . Short of heavies, the only one that can do better is... the F-15E, and it can actually hit moving targets! Oops!

The maneuverability is laughable. You couldn't possibly get down in the weeds, as the pilots say, with this airplane and turn in time to see a tank. Remember, a tank is not visible from even maybe from a quarter mile or less. This airplane at the speeds at which it has to go because of the tiny wings... Remember, it can't maneuver so it can't fly slow, nor should it in combat, because it's so vulnerable.

I am pretty sure this guy's knowledge of aircraft sensors ended in the 1970s. This is not a problem for any single jet in our inventory as long as it has the right weapons to use against the tank. Even his pathetic lawn dart flipper baby can do it.

Unless he means to strafe the tank with guns, in which case, he should be checked for Alzheimer's because it has definitely not been 1977 for 37 years.

Every Battle of Britain radar would see the F-35 and the F-22 and the B-2. I'm not talking here as an antiquarian because unfortunately, the Russians picked up on this and have been building exactly those radars because World War Two. They never stopped building low-frequency, low-wavelength radars. And they've modernized them to an extraordinary extent, they've built some really amazing mobile versions of them now that are hard to find when they're camoflaged and can be erected in 40 minutes, can see every stealth airplane in the world, and they sell them to anybody who's got cash.

Which is why the entire US inventory of F-117s and B-2s were lost in Desert Storm.

This is Alex Jones level taintlickery.

The point is to spend money. That is the the mission of the airplane, is for the US Congress to send money to Lockheed. That's the real mission of the airplane.

Sadly, this is 100% correct.

And I guarantee you by the time all the failings of the F-35 have come to light...

Predictions are just part of the reasons I referenced Alex Jones. But I do find it realistic that we will never buy more than 500 airplanes as the international buyers drop out.

I suspect one of the European fighters would've won. Not that they're very good, they're just not as bad as the F-35. The Gripen or the Eurofighter, as they have won in other countries...

The Gripen is more comparable to the F-16/F-35 than the Eurofighter, which is more along the lines of the F-15/F-22. But of course they won in Europe; they're built there, all with local military-industrial complexes and (in the case of the Eurofighter) an almost-as-huge international clusterfuck of interests.

The hooker would be the people doing the competition would have to understand that stealth is a shaky business, it's a scam

Which is apparently why they go to such lengths to emphasize that the Eurofighter is ACKSHOOLAY OONSTYBLE ON PUHPUSS. Because 40-year-old design theory is suddenly revolutionary when they do it, and beats stealth.

What did the Yugoslavs do to shoot down the F-117? They were well aware they were being invaded by stealth airplanes, and they figured out how to shoot it down.

Or as Russian customers the Serbs bought the Russian's best guess on how to defeat our oldest stealth technology and got lucky once. Once.

That's what everyone's gonna do who thinks they might be bombed by a stealthy airplane.

See previous comment about Desert Storm and reapply it to Southern/Northern Watch, OEF, OIF, and Odyssey Dawn.

Oh sure, he sounds legit, but he's just some old douchecanoe.

The F-16 was designed to "smoke the F-15"? He clearly can't meet a design goal either, then!

Absolutely -- after the close and into a turning fight. Just like a Scooter could give a Turkey fits once in close contact.

In a turning fight without any real-world combat configuration (i.e. ECM/NAV/targeting pods mounted, and/or CFTs on export versions to give them something approaching a useful fuel load) and minimal external fuel, after the F-16 has somehow closed to knife fighting range against an F-15E... sure.

But only then.

[Yogimus]

And the F-14 would swat em both out of the sky from 100 miles out.

[Jericho941]

Which wouldn't happen because some clever bastard set up a volleyball net and left a couple bottles of Astroglide around it.