I’m surprised that a crashing F-35 wouldn’t generate enough fire and smoke to be easily detected.
Maybe not? This article references some examples of planes landing intact: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/f-35-cant-be-found-aft...
Planes like the F-22 are inherently aerodynamically unstable because it allows then to be highly maneuverable, The stability of the aircraft is handled by the electronics. So back then planes of the that type would be able to just glide down and land but with a F-22 or any modern military jet, it wouldn't.
> If F-35 is such a failure, how come many countries have chosen to buy it? What's the alternative? How many other models can be purchased at all? Canada went through a bunch of drama to find a replacement for the legacy F/A-18s, and the main options were: Eurofighter Typhoon, Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, F-35, and the Saab Gripen. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning... Gripen wasn't in t…
> Personally I'd be happy with... There's a lot of armchair quarterbacking in these comments, this one taking the cake.
HN weighing in on military stuff is always comedy to those of us who've been in the military. It's nobody's fault – this stuff can be baroque in its complexity – but it does make for some entertaining reading!
An iPhone would be over a billion dollars if we only made 40.
I'd love to have a civilian version of the F-35 for joyride operators, but I guess half of the point of a military aircraft is that your enemies can't buy one.
The Musk v Zuckerberg cage fight would’ve been much better as a dog fight between their private F-35s. I mean, why should mega billionaires fight the same way any two broke guys from Jersey would anyway?
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.
It’s definitely BS. Transponders aside, the US has radar and near real-time satellite imagery of every square inch of American territory. There is a zero percent chance they don’t know where this plane is.
BTW, the only real-time satellite imagery of all of the US is from weather satellites in geosynchronous orbit. Which has the resolution of a city.
If near real-time, you mean a couple of times per day. There aren't enough LEO observation satellites to provide complete coverage.
> We know the JSF is a giant expensive computer. I wonder what code is in the exception block for when the plane is working but the pilot leaves. Maybe it does just try and gently crash somewhere. I doubt there's an exception block for that. What if there's a fault and it triggers while the pilot is still in the plane? > It's more surprising it didn't have some sort of phone home, become a drone, style fall back mech…
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.
I think the Ukraine war and Russia's poor showing has proved that in some ways it is far more catastrophic to underestimate your enemies than to overestimate them.
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.
There are not going to be many situations where you need this advantage, have an AWACS but your opponent doesn't, and your AWACS is able to survive while being close enough to be helpful (both Russia and China have missiles that outrange an AWACS's radar, and the China and the US have stealthy planes and slightly lesser range missiles). It's a real limitation, it's problematic, and it has no upsides.
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 TFR…
It isn't - the fighter is not designed on the assumption it can rely on an AWACS, because they're very vulnerable aircraft. For many F-* jets, AWACS datalink was actually added later on.
I'm curious if the F35 had a luneburg lens installed or not. If it didn't and did not have an active transponder it would make things much more difficult.
The thing you’re thinking of is the pilot. If the plane is capable of control, the pilot will move it on a trajectory away from populated areas if possible. Protecting innocent people on the ground in the case of an emergency was always top of mind, you can see this in the crash reporting for multiple real world incidents (in airframes with, and without ejection seats, where the last actions of the aircrew were steer…
Actually, no. A pilot might punch from a perfectly flyable aircraft that ran out of fuel and can't be glided in due to terrain. Or a plane that has no propulsion for other reasons. They might even punch from a plane with some fuel but damage that precludes landing--if they're over civilization they might point it into nowhere and punch so they come down over civilization.
The key point is that the plane does not crash in a populated area (and secondarily that a military plane is destroyed if crashing in an area not controlled by the owner); in both of your examples, the pilot routinely does the first if not necessarily the second.
I think MANPADs somewhat negate traditional Wild Weasel tactics. Wild Weasel worked because you could use a jet as bait to find the position of a SAM site. That worked fine when a SAM site was multiple trailers, and took a day to move. With MANPADs, you don't have a fixed base, and if you discover where one is (because it shot at you), that information isn't useful, because by the time you know where it is, it isn't…
MANPADs can't even shoot at a jet because they're flying too high. There's only so much rocket propellant you can put onto a shoulder-mounted device that humans have to carry around. If you're only guarded by MANPADs, then a traditional bomber will blast your position repeatedly. The MANPADs are really there to deal with low-flying aircraft (A10 and Helicopters). EDIT: I guess the AC-130 cruises at high speeds, but s…
> Because its large profile and low operating altitudes around 7,000 feet (2,100 m) make it an easy target, its close air support missions are usually flown at night.[7]
AC-130 is only effective against a flipflop army... which doesn't have a friend which would supply tons of MANPADs to the gallant people of your country.