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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

#731

Post by jki275 »

Judgmentality wrote: post #705
jki275 wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of highly qualified people who have flown it say otherwise. https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/f-35-faces-mos... Chip Berke is an F22 and F35 test pilot, and the first F35 Squadron commander. He's probably the most qualified person on the planet to talk about fifth gen aircraft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxK6O5--9Z0&t=203s

Admittedly my sample size is 1 so I'm not pretending my anecdata is conclusive, but you have to be wary of what people will say publicly about politically motivated projects. EDIT: Although to be fair, I wrote that before looking at your links, I feel like that context is important (although I stand by my statement).

Sure, that's definitely fair.

The F35 has been badly politicized, but it has also been the victim of an absolute shitload of criticism from people who want it to be something it was never intended to be and are unhappy that the F22 was cancelled early.

If it were just that Colonel Berke liked the plane, it would be one thing. He really explains it in detail in the video. I'll admit I wasn't quite sold on the the plane years ago, but once I saw this video it pretty thoroughly changed my mind.

I realize the video is a bit long, and I almost never post links to videos -- but this one is well worth the watch.

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

#732

Post by shipman05 »

nemothekid wrote: post #142
medium_burrito wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, a while back I was interested "where does billions we spend on national defense actually go" and I came to the conclusion that the DoD is really just a giant jobs program. Ultimately I think the reason we don't have things like flying cars is that the private sector gets stuck in local maxima (such as getting people to click ads) and in the public sector it's very hard to have focused time-blocked short term goa…

Absolutely a giant jobs program, but, as importantly, it's a conservative-friendly jobs program.

Republicans (nominally) care about spending, but make an exception for defense. Democrats care less about spending, and are afraid of being attacked for being "weak on defense".

Neither party has any incentive to rein this sort of spending in, so they don't.

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

#733

Post by jki275 »

marshmallow_12 wrote: post #722
jki275 wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you shop? The problem with massive development efforts like this is that there aren't a lot of competitors. In this particular field, there are two, and not really even quite two exactly.

i don't understand why 200 billion dollars wouldn't be enough for the US to make their own plane company.

We did, we made several of them.

Lockheed, Boeing, Northrup, etc...

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

#735

Post by nikodunk »

CoffeeDregs wrote: post #725

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-pay…

Very interesting proposition. Small side note - a lot of this $300/year/tax-payer is flowing back into paying US salaries in various states... which is probably recursively why the ticket price is so high in the first place (cost-plus, politicians and all).

Also, the $60,000/tax-payer Covid ticket price (though I find that source questionable) is missing averaging out over multiple years as you said yourself. Needs to be consistent with the other number.

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

#736

Post by marshmallow_12 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #536
medium_burrito wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We can build cool shit, but our government and most companies don't optimize for that. ARPA was always kind of a jobs program, but nonetheless it created the internet at the same time as NASA was putting a man on the moon, the government was successfully building the interstate highways and Bell Labs was Bell Labs instead of whatever it is now. Today we get the F-35 and the Big Dig and whatever other money furnace…

don't worry it just needs war to get there things going. Warfare drives all innovation. I can't think of anything major last century that wasn't developed for military uses. I think we will get another infusion of war in about 18 years when China will start blowing everyone out of antarctica. Government will carry on pretending to care about environment and proceed to release vast amounts of carbon in the South Pole. It's an entirely predictable conflict, yet only China will be partly prepared.

-The Prophecy of The Thirteenth Marshmallow

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

#737

Post by sebmellen »

CoffeeDregs wrote: post #725

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-pay…

I've always wished for (and wanted to develop) a calculator which would take in your taxes paid, and calculate exactly how many dollars and cents of your tax bill went to which programs. I'm sure the results would shock most Americans.

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

#738

Post by bananabreakfast »

CoffeeDregs wrote: post #725

Putting aside the good-plane/bad-plane discussion, this program is the poster child for one of my pet wishes: that the costs of government programs would be expressed in $/tax-payer. There are about 100M tax payers in the US; this program is expected to cost about $1,500,000M; so the F35 program is expected to cost about $15,000 per tax payer. True: that's over 50 years; still, un-discounted, that's $300/year/tax-pay…

That's a flawed way of looking at tax statistics.

Sure, it's $60k per tax payer by just dividing the total paid by the tax payer cardinality. And in that sense, that much of the federal budget that you have a voice for was allocated in that way.

However, comparing that number to how much tax you're paying in a given year is wildly inaccurate. The mean income tax paid in the US last year was ~$15k, but the median is closer to ~$5k [0] The ultra wealthy pay very disproportionately more of the total income tax and skew the mean upward significantly.

Therefore, the average US tax payer would have contributed likely far less than $300/year at something more like [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-fed...

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

#739

Post by bluGill »

wombatmobile wrote: post #64
bluGill wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In industry when you realize a project is going to fail it is common to pack it with a bunch of marginally related things that you want in your project but cannot afford. Then when they complete what you want you take it for no cost. It makes your project look better on the bottom line (ROI or whatever metric accountants use to judge), and the other project eventually is written off. Would the company be better off j…

Is the project a fail for Lockheed Martin? Didn't they get paid a bunch of money for it? Don't they get paid again each time there's a rev?

Hard to say. Do they lose reputation? Did they not do something else?

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

#740

Post by greedo »

protomyth wrote: post #604
jetrink wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Not to mention the F-16 itself, which the F-35 was meant to replace: 1972: RFP for prototypes 1974: Maiden flight of the first prototype 1975: Production begins 1980: The aircraft officially enters service

1981: Used by Israel to blow up Iraq nuclear reactor Oddly, they used F-15s to provide escort. This attack took place after two Phantom F-4-E of Iran missed.

Why "Oddly?" The F-15 was the best air supremacy fighter of that era; perfect for escorting bomb-laden F-16s that would have had a difficult time protecting themselves.
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