591–600 of 693 posts
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> 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!
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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, som…
This is an… unorthodox take from the ground commander/fires perspective or conversely the orthodox take from the USAF perspective. Hard lessons from the GWOT have firmly put the A10 as the most capable CAS platform, and it’s taught as such in all joint fires classes to forward observers and also via unit history/anecdotes fires units (“A10 saved my butt in ‘12”). A10 pilots and units also have a much better rep for C…
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But why? Don’t these billion dollar machines have a GPS tracker on them?
They have transponders. But military airplanes can and sometimes do turn them off. When airplanes broadcast signals they can be detected. The military sometimes wishes to avoid this.
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.
An iPhone would be over a billion dollars if we only made 40.
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https://www.aviacionline.com/2022/01/f-35-cheaper-than-the-g... Specific figures will differ depending on how exactly one calculates acquisition costs. These numbers differ depending on the acquiring country, the block numbers, etc. But as rule of thumb the F-35 cost is roughly 10 million USD cheaper than the much less capable Gripen. This is notable as the Gripen is being marketed as the cheaper alternative. The F-3…
From the article the cost per flight hour is around $8,000 for Gripen and $33,300 for the F35A. The Finish and Swiss most likely have no clue what the final full life-cycle costs will be. No-one knows this cost. The US who sold it knows a bit more than the Finns and the Swiss, but not even they know. Time will tell. The F35 program has overrun it's costs over and over. The purchase price of the F35A (the conventional…
Note that you need to compare with competing programs.
Notably, F35 can be actually seriously produced (unlike say its supposed competition Su-57)
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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…
> By the time a pilot ejects they’ve exhausted EVERY other option to control the aircraft, no AI is going to regain control at that point. It seems like they probably bail out when they've exhausted every option of being able to land it and survive. There are likely some scenarios where there's limited controls remaining, that wouldn't provide high enough odds of guaranteeing someone's survival, but that could optimi…
>Notably, the F-15, (with a crew of two), managed to land safely at a nearby airbase, despite having its right wing almost completely sheared off in the collision. The lifting body properties of the F-15, together with its overabundant engine thrust, allowed the pilot to achieve this unique feat.
Just posting here because it is awesome.
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If you read that Wikipedia page, it’s pretty clear the plane would have not recovered without the change in nose attitude from the ejection.
Which contradicts your original claim that "no AI is going to regain control at that point."
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They have transponders. But military airplanes can and sometimes do turn them off. When airplanes broadcast signals they can be detected. The military sometimes wishes to avoid this.
It could activate after ejection, certain acceleration pattern (i.e. crash) or could start broadcasting only after receiving very specific signal (one-time code) on a specific frequency. There are probably plenty more options, it doesn't seem like a hard problem from engineering standpoint.
There’s pros and cons to the enemy finding you but generally I’d imagine you want to give the pilot the chance to escape.