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F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

thedrive.com

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Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#181

Post by lumost »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #174
kunwon1 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert on aircraft procurement or government contracts (I'm an engineer who used to work on fighter jets) - that being said, it's my understanding that the F-35 is actually a very successful project, and a very affordable one at that. I haven't got any citations or evidence to present, I could be wrong about all of this, it's a topic I've got only casual knowledge about. A broad overview of my understanding of…

I've read some analyses of the F35 vs A10 which don't favour the F35 for CAS operations much. The main thing I saw was that F35 requires more maintenance and longer runways than the A10 and is more fragile. It depends on what kind of a war that is being fought, but in a major great power war, you couldn't always guarantee having nice high quality air bases, runways, and support teams near the front. Sometimes it is p…

It is unnecessary to have a manned CAS fighter doing strafing runs. A cheap Drone in the 1-5MM range could do the job better. Or rely on high altitude/stealth precision bombing.

The A-10 was built for a war in Europe that never came. You can see how well the equivalent SU-25 Frogfoot fairs against Manpads in Ukraine today.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#182

Post by mcpackieh »

delfinom wrote: post #60
Fluorescence wrote: post #56

This sounds too ridiculous to be true. I'd be more inclined to believe that it's a gambit to flush out an intelligence leak rather than an inability to find their own $160M plane.

[flagged]

The federal government provides billions of free or reduced price meals to school children every year. American schools do not let you not eat lunch, if you try to skip lunch you will have a lunch forcibly given to you for free for as long as it takes the school administration to figure out what is going on with your parents. Your parents will be billed for the lunches if they can afford it, and if not you will be signed up for the federal free lunch program. But either way this plays out, they will not allow you to not eat a lunch.

Even if you plead that you ate a huge breakfast and you aren't hungry, they will put a tray of food in front of you anyway.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/ch...

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#184

Post by dylan604 »

belter wrote: post #168
slavboj wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire point of the airplane is to never get into close combat. It's like asking which navy has better bayonets.

A theory pushed constantly by the F-35 program, but quickly dismissed by the Ukrainian War. "Dogfight Over Ukraine Shows The Air War Is Still Very Much Being Fought" - https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/dogfight-over-ukraine-...

Just because the F-35 was designed to be a strike aircraft more than a dogfighter doesn't mean that it won't be put in those situations. We've been using butter knives as screwdrivers for as long as we've had a butter knife but no screwdriver.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#185

Post by valec »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #174
kunwon1 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm no expert on aircraft procurement or government contracts (I'm an engineer who used to work on fighter jets) - that being said, it's my understanding that the F-35 is actually a very successful project, and a very affordable one at that. I haven't got any citations or evidence to present, I could be wrong about all of this, it's a topic I've got only casual knowledge about. A broad overview of my understanding of…

I've read some analyses of the F35 vs A10 which don't favour the F35 for CAS operations much. The main thing I saw was that F35 requires more maintenance and longer runways than the A10 and is more fragile. It depends on what kind of a war that is being fought, but in a major great power war, you couldn't always guarantee having nice high quality air bases, runways, and support teams near the front. Sometimes it is p…

The F-35 has a much faster response time than the A-10--and, more importantly, survivability. In a contested environment, "suboptimal" CAS from an F-35 dropping precision munitions is much better than non at all (A-10 would get shot out of the sky by any near-peer before it could approach the theater).

The A-10 also has high maintenance costs and a relatively low loiter time. For fighting terrorists in flipflops, something like a super-tucano does its job for a tenth of the operating cost.

Fundamentally, the A-10 was not built for CAS. It was built as a last-ditch, suicide strafer of Soviet convoys during a land war in Europe. Very few were projected to survive past the first week.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#186

Post by some_random »

belter wrote: post #168
slavboj wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire point of the airplane is to never get into close combat. It's like asking which navy has better bayonets.

A theory pushed constantly by the F-35 program, but quickly dismissed by the Ukrainian War. "Dogfight Over Ukraine Shows The Air War Is Still Very Much Being Fought" - https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/dogfight-over-ukraine-...

That dogfight is newsworthy because it's exceptional, and even still it's not a turning duel by any stretch of the imagination. The real takeaway from the Ukrainian war is that stealth and engagement range are paramount.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#187

Post by jameshart »

btbuildem wrote: post #70

An 80's movie dream is playing out for some rural kids, where they stumble upon a smouldering high-tech wreckage and as they explore it, men in suits pour out of black SUVs and talk to them in taciturn ways. Seriously though, these jets sound terribly overpriced for how unreliable they seem to be.

You don’t hear about the ones that don’t crash.

To determine that this crash is evidence of unreliability would require you to have detailed knowledge of the operational and training volume and tempo they’re flying with - in comparison to other aircraft and their comparative failure rate.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#188

Post by justsomehnguy »

belter wrote: post #168
slavboj wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire point of the airplane is to never get into close combat. It's like asking which navy has better bayonets.

A theory pushed constantly by the F-35 program, but quickly dismissed by the Ukrainian War. "Dogfight Over Ukraine Shows The Air War Is Still Very Much Being Fought" - https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/dogfight-over-ukraine-...

> theory pushed constantly by the F-35 program

Because F-35 operation manual, chapter 1, "Combat prerequisites":

Lob anti-SAM missiles till the enemy wouldn't have any operational SAM, then you can fly in on your fancy F-35.

/s but only slightly

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#189

Post by Workaccount2 »

macintux wrote: post #95
NavinF wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have children starving in schools

It's not pretty right now. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/05/03/1173535...

The problem that the US has is that calories are too cheap. Look at the class demographics of obesity. It's pretty clear no one is starving.

Re: F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

#190

Post by the_sleaze9 »

melling wrote: post #135
delfinom wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Sort of an absurd thing to say. However, it’s repeated all the time, and in every generation in some form. One really has nothing to do with the other. If we could educate people at a younger age so they understand this, maybe we can make more progress in creating a better society. Start with the fact that military spending has decreased as a percentage of GDP: https://www.statista.com/statistics/217581/outlays-for-d…

What an odd form of comparison, Military spending is almost entirely a function of tax, not Gross Domestic Product of a country.

But taking just one aspect of that graph – overall military spending - it's true that spending has decreased since we were involved in a full scale occupation of another country, assaulting several others, then whack-a-moling the downstream consequences of those wars. It is also (in my humble opinion) extremely disingenuous to not include the direct financing of another country's war (Ukraine) which at this time is something around 80 billion.

- Also something to note is underneath your gdpgovernment-spending graph it states spending in 2022 was 746 billion, predicted to increase to 1.1 trillion next year.

While spending on education was 42.5 billion in 2022.

You are correct in that we need to educate people better, it is not accurate to say we could solve a plethora of societal issues with just a fraction of the financial fuel the military industrial complex requires.

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