Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 1001 posts

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#91

Post by GekkePrutser »

cwwc wrote: post #62
uncoder0 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worked around F16's and F22's when I was in and can attest that this is the source of the issue for upgrades. Everything in the software is so tightly coupled to the hardware that updating the F16's would be a monumental effort. The difference between a 4th and 5th generation air frame are night and day in terms of software capabilities. Hell, even the different between 5th generation jets can be massive on the softw…

does this make them inherently safer from a 'hack'?

I don't think so.. Probably less safe as software in the 80s was definitely built with less of a focus on digital security. Back in those days telnet was considered secure :)

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#92

Post by QuesnayJr »

supernova87a wrote: post #63

I guess along the way, the activity of designing and building the plane became more important than the outcome / functionality of the plane itself. You see it all the time in projects. People look busy and seem like they're building things, so some progress must be happening. Or is it? Blink an eye, and in a couple years you unwittingly accumulated a platform that served to fulfill every random team's desire to load…

I think the original requirements were unreasonable. They wanted a single plane that could support the Air Force, the Navy, and the Marines. This was too hard, so they compromised on a platform that could be adapted to multiple uses, but even that was a bad idea.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#93

Post by Zardoz84 »

kcb wrote: post #52
danjac wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I can't really see much benefit to that Look at the recent Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to see how much UAVs are a game-changer: https://www.csis.org/analysis/air-and-missile-war-nagorno-ka...

But how do you translate that into hitting something going Mach 1 at 40k feet? A UAV capable of attacking a jet can exist. My point is that it would need to be a fully capable aircraft not something that can be produced cheaply and deployed in swarms. There's a lot of space in the sky.

At some point these jets must be at ground, not ? A swarm of UAVs can do a lot of damage on these situation.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#96

Post by thanatosmin »

missedthecue wrote: post #85
rayhendricks wrote: post #72

It did not fail at providing money to the military-industrial-congressional complex. But of course we need more fighter jets instead of Medicare for all and UBI. China is not going to send fighters over to Bomb the us mainland, this thing is totally unnecessary.

The total costs to keep all F-35s in the air until 2070 (likely after you and I are dead and in the ground), would not even cover 6 months of Medicare for all or UBI. Not sure how you can draw such an equivalence.

Just the acquisition costs would cover the entire NIH budget for a decade, though.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#97

Post by inglor_cz »

misiti3780 wrote: post #86

The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost. This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chan…

SpaceX is an interesting exception. They innovate really fast, their pace resembles that of the positive examples you mention.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#98

Post by GekkePrutser »

vhcd wrote: post #75

Wasn't the goal of the F-35 to sell an inferior aircraft to allies and keep the F-22 for the real action? I don't know the sales figures, but it may have been a success using those metrics.

Allies have cut back on the F-35 orders too on about the same scale. But no I don't think it was ever planned to replace the F-22. The F-22 is really an interceptor, the F-35 is much more multirole like the F-16.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#99

Post by beckingz »

This is just an attempt to get funding for aircraft that will be bad.

Any new aircraft they develop to be cheaper will suffer the same scope and budget creep that the F-35 did.

We won't send pilots out in planes that are known to have low survivability, so when the new aircraft is insufficiently stealthy/fast/survivable, more money will be spent to make it even worse than the F-35.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#100

Post by medium_burrito »

misiti3780 wrote: post #86

The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost. This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chan…

You misunderstand the purpose the F35- it is a jobs and pork program first and foremost, like SLS. It has the side benefit of keeping people trained to build this sort of thing, so SpaceX can hire them.

We can build cool shit, but our government and most companies don't optimize for that.

Post reply on HN