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F-35 can’t be found after pilot ejected

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

#291

Post by toomuchtodo »

jsbisviewtiful wrote: post #147
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.

You'd be surprised to learn then that the United States has lost several (6, last I knew) nuclear weapons over the decades. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220804-the-lost-nuclear...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear...

> The US Department of Defense has officially recognized at least 32 "Broken Arrow" incidents from 1950 to 1980.

https://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/media/filer_p...

> Unofficially, the Defense Atomic Support Agency (now known as the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA)) has detailed hundreds of "Broken Arrow" incidents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_nuclear... ("Broken Arrow refers to an accidental event that involves nuclear weapons, warheads or components that does not create a risk of nuclear war.")

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

#292

Post by SkyMarshal »

darknavi wrote: post #205
brobdingnagians wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do drones get around the issue of communications jamming? I suppose they have some way (autonomous would be one way), but it seems to me that if communications are cut off, having a pilot with human judgement to respond to changing conditions will almost always have some advantage. Although, you could get a pretty advanced autonomous system that responded to changes from a pre-programmed attack plan.

Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez is a great book (great in audio book form!) about autonomous drones and comms blackouts.

Can you give us a TLDR what it says about comms blackouts and jamming?

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

#294

Post by kkielhofner »

dylan604 wrote: post #269
kkielhofner wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you watch YouTube replay simulations[0] with ATC (air traffic control) when pilots violate a TFR (temporary flight restriction) for something like The President it's comical how long it takes for the interception fighters to find the target. It turns out the F-* radar is terrible at these kinds of situations. They almost always end up getting vectored in by air traffic control with their much more powerful ground…

Individual radar tracking on the F-* planes is kind an advantage as they are typically vectored in by airborne radar like AWACs in actual combat. There are advantages to this, with the most obvious is the opponent doesn't know where the attack is coming from since they are only being lit up by the AWACs. They can be vectored in from the most advantageous angle for the attacker in total passive mode.

That's a really good point - I'm certainly familiar with AWACS in concept but I didn't connect the dots here.

Thing is, in these scenarios they're the only armed aircraft around and their targets never have radar or any instrumentation/defense/even detection for it. So they could (and likely do) blast and paint all day and they still can't find bug smashers in dense urban environments like you most often see with TFRs.

I can understand the fighter radar is probably designed assuming assistance from AWACS but it still seems really strange to me.

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

#295

Post by dgroshev »

codedokode wrote: post #195
gonzo41 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Ukraine war and Russia's poor showing has proved that in some ways the west is overestimating the capabilities of it's enemies.

But the West also underestimates, for example, cheap Iranian drones that can be easily mass produced and cost much less than the missiles to shoot them down.

The West does not. Major R&D effort went into laser based SHORAD that is basically free to fire, with units being already deployed. Besides that, good old C-RAM would take those out no problem.

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

#296

Post by JumpinJack_Cash »

mrtksn wrote: post #152
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…

All that might turn out to be irrelevant as the drones prove detrimental in a warfare. With the advancements in AI in recent years, it will probably get harder and harder to justify carrying a biological being and all the support systems onboard. At some point, a warplane capabilities might become irrelevant and the only important aspect would the the implications of carrying a solder onboard and making the downing o…

> > All that might turn out to be irrelevant as the drones prove detrimental in a warfare.

I highly doubt it. At least I hope so.

Nobody dreams of becoming a drone pilot. At the end of the day it's a cubicle job.

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

#298

Post by mrguyorama »

yabones wrote: post #88
lambersley wrote: post #74

$1.2T to OPERATE the F-35 program, yikes! I would love to see the TCO figures on an F-35 (or not). US Military budget concepts have always blown my mind.

Not to say $1.2T is nothing, but that's over the lifespan of the program. It's like if you paid for your car plus all the fuel, oil changes, spare parts, tires, car wash, toll roads, all up front. > $1.2 trillion to operate and maintain the fleet over more than 60 years.

Holy cow, 60 years is the design life of the F35?! We will somehow still be operating these things in 2150!

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

#299

Post by larkost »

safety1st wrote: post #136
ensignavenger wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"food insecurity" is not the same as starving.

I was wondering how 1 in 8 children could be experiencing food insecurity in a nation with a 40% obesity rate, and what food insecurity was exactly, so I poked around in their methodology a little. https://www.feedingamerica.org/sites/default/files/2022-08/M... Happy to be corrected if I'm misreading this. But if I understand correctly, they go into it on page 8, and there are basically two ways they calculate food i…

My kids go to a school where the majority of the kids are somewhere around poverty level (easy to be under there in Silicon Valley if you are not an engineer in tech).

I absolutely believe the administrators when they say that the meals some of the kids get in school might be the only ones they get for the day (by far not the majority: those are hard working parents, dedicated to their kids). And watching how much hand-holding is needed for some of the families on the pre-school-year paperwork day (back to school night) I am fully convinced that the worst-off kids are likely to wind up without food if their receiving it depends on their parents filling out forms.

And I want to be clear that the kids I think might be on the edge are not (in most cases) there because of neglect. They are there because living here is more expensive than their parents can afford completely, despite working long hours. That is a condemnation of a society that mis-appropriates the wealth (like on Engineers like me).

Yes, it is a waste of money that my kids (kids of a Silicon Valley Engineer) get their food for free, but looking at the alternative (kids going hungry), is it really that much of a waste?

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

#300

Post by pohl »

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.

I've seen some analysis that, per hour of flight time, these tend towards the most trouble-free end of the spectrum. Someone will need to run those numbers again, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if, even with this incident, that was still the case.
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