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

forbes.com

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

#301

Post by drewvolpe »

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…

NASA just successfully sent a helicopter to Mars. We developed two very effective vaccines using mRNA technology in a few months and had it through FDA trials in under a year. CAR T cell therapies (3 FDA approved and more coming) are changing how we treat cancer. There's amazing technology all around you.

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

#302

Post by blt »

The problems with the F-35 feel analogous to problems we face in the software industry.

At the implementation level, we tend to underestimate the cost of making a system extensible and "future-proof", and underestimate the value of implementing a narrowly focused system from scratch.

At the specification level, product managers too often are willing to add every feature that big customers request.

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

#303

Post by landryraccoon »

jboog wrote: post #169
heymijo wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) [0]. You might have missed this news. It’s a modern remix to the Kelly Johnson and Ben Rich days of developing legendary aircraft at Lockheed’s Skunkworks that you lamented the loss of. People in the know confirm it’s legit and shocking, in a good way. Especially compared to the failures of the F-35 and even the F-22’s development. [0] https://www.airforcemag.com/article/ropers-ng…

Big if true but I'm super skeptical. First of all how many years have we been hearing about how we'll have fully autonomous vehicles just around the corner? At least a decade. How many years have we been hearing that human-like AI is just around the corner? At least since the 60's. I'm skeptical (although optimistic) about massive tech breakthroughs in general. Even more so when it comes to military tech since so man…

No matter when it happens, I think that when General AI shows up most of us will be shocked and surprised.

General AI showing up will be kind of like the discovery of quantum mechanics and the nuclear bomb. No matter how much speculative fiction we write about it, we won't be able to predict ahead of time how transformative it will be on society once it actually exists.

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

#304

Post by Unklejoe »

grecy wrote: post #213
LegitShady wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many countries have far worse standards of care than the US. I live in Canada, and waited more than a year for a specialist. It took me 2 years to find a family doctor with decent reviews who was accepting patients . I needed an MRI once and the wait was measured in months. I waited four months for just a cortisone shot, before the pandemic. I'm not claiming one system is better than another. Certainly if you're weal…

> Many countries have far worse standards of care than the US. I'll need a citation for that. When a country has 29 million people without health insurance [1], and medical bills are the number one cause of bankruptcy, I think it's safe to say the average standard of care is way, way lower than Canada, Australia, Germany, etc. where literally every person gets care. [1] https://www.kff.org/uninsured/issue-brief/key-f…

It really depends on what you mean by "standard of care".

Yes, there are a lot of people without coverage in the USA, and there are a lot of people in deep medical debt.

However, when it comes to the actual quality of the healthcare facilities, the USA does have some of the best in the world (CHOP, UPenn, Mayo Clinic, etc.). The fact that it's extremely expensive/overpriced is a different issue.

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

#305

Post by hctaw »

filoleg wrote: post #285
Synaesthesia wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Militarism is a colossal waste of taxpayer money.

Not when you have a few adversarial nation-states around the corner that do not consider it a waste of taxpayer money.

A $10 billion investment in anti aircraft missiles that forces a $100 billion investment in aircraft instead of schools and semiconductor fabs is great ROI for an adversarial nation state that knows their government would be wiped off the face of the planet if they ever decided to use them.

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

#306

Post by michaelt »

mohaine wrote: post #148
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.

How are you sure someone isn't `going to send fighters over to Bomb the us mainland`? I'm pretty sure no one is going to do that and yes we way overspend on the MIC but really sending militaries over to other countries was the status quo for almost as long as countries have existed. There is no real reason to expect that will not happen again just because we are going on 80 years since anyone made a serious effort to…

If the American establishment thought there was any chance of attack by Chinese fighters, they wouldn't have built a shitty plane as a jobs program.

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

#307

Post by craftinator »

usrusr wrote: post #175
abarringer wrote: post #76

If the primary purpose was to funnel money from you -> .mil -> military industrial complex it succeed wildly beyond all expectations. Otherwise not so much. I lived and worked very close to Eglin Air Force base where all the initial F35's went. Many Air Force people thought the primary design decisions were to spend money and little else.

But there's a reason to funnel that money besides padding pockets: the nominal reason (and not a bad one if you are not a full pacifist) is to retain development capability for the next time you actually do need a military aviation innovation burst. And arguably this wasn't really successful. Chances are that rebuilding capability from a hypothetical starved state would yield better results than restoring efficiency…

> the nominal reason (and not a bad one if you are not a full pacifist) is to retain development capability for the next time

Is the F-35 a good example of what we want our next aircraft to be? It seems to me that we now have a whole development infrastructure set up to build expensive, buggy aircraft. That "development capability" that we've retained isn't a good one.

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

#309

Post by RapidFire »

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…

We already have flying cars; they are called helicopters. I'm not sure you want to live in a neighborhood that has people commuting by helicopters; it would be very noisy.

Want an example of crazy cool shit we just accomplished? Covid vaccine. Creating a vaccine/testing in less than a year and now distributing it at such a massive scale will likely go down in history as an event akin to the Manhattan Project.

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

#310

Post by AcerbicZero »

Gee I never would have guessed that a one size fits all replacement for every F- aircraft (and more than a few A-‘s) in the inventory for every branch would be difficult.

It was a trillion dollar stimulus package (or welfare) directed at the good old military industrial complex, plus it helps placate the chicken hawks in Congress who wanted pork for their district. Like most weapon systems developed in peacetime with unclear use cases, it’s kind of just an expensive tech demo.

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