111–120 of 213 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think at large european industry has more stake in F-35 not being bought, and local planes be used instead.
The internal conflict is that the European planes that exist are nowhere as capable as the F-35. While the European defense contractors may promise a comparable plane, they have a poor track record of delivering such a thing anywhere close to the near future.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
True. However, did you notice the emojis used in relation to the leaked Huthi attack? It’s difficult to place confidence in individuals wielding significant power when they conduct themselves like adolescents.
This doesn’t feel fair. The standards we have for how elected officials conduct themselves is very different from what we expect from non-political career civil servants, General Officers, and the like. At our most charitable, we ought to recognize that in a democracy elected officials are plucked from the ranks of the general public. The qualifications for office are that you are the most popular person in the room,…
Obviously, it is a gamble, to wit the current administration, but I'm sure, on election day, most voters of the USA thought that the current president would do the best job. Many learn now they were mistaken, but this happens. That's the beauty of democracy, we can vote the incompetents out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also refuse to update the electronic countermeasures systems installed in Ukraine's F16. Not a kill switch, but it is impacting the usefulness of the planes. Whether actual kill switches exist is unknown. But if you were a European country, would you take the chance of buying fighters from a country threatening to invade multiple of your allies based on their assurance that the rumors about kill switches are not…
Well denmark is going ahead to buy F-35 from their enemy that wants to invade them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is only happening thanks to the way US view on the world has changed, and the remote kill switch used against Ukrainian jets. US has killed the allies trust. Had these two events not happened, and most likely sales would not have been cancelled regardless of the F-35 issues.
> the remote kill switch used against Ukrainian jets. Could you provide some references to this? A quick search only turned up denials that such a kill switch exists.
This was discussed four months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42098475 From my memory at the time, I was initially fully on the side of the pilot, but after reading through the discussion, I wasn't really sure anymore. He didn't try to see if his flight controls (pitch, yaw, roll) were still responding, he didn't make use of the backup instruments, he didn't try the backup radio, and he had enough fuel to…
Extremely easy for you to write this treatise from the comfort of your armchair. Do you understand this failure occurred at less than a thousand feet AGL?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My feeling is that the F-35 is "too big to fail" Allies cancelling orders may force Washington’s hand: the cost of additional jets, parts, et cerera skyrocket if spread over fewer planes.
A common misconception - often echoed on this site - is that NATO allies and the U.S. operate on equal terms. They don’t. If the U.S. wants to sell 100 F-35s to European nations, it will happen. Even today, with all this talk around NATO, there’s a massive U.S. military presence at NATO bases across Europe. These forces are, in effect, under U.S. control, stationed in countries like Germany and Italy. And if Germany…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They don’t. If the U.S. wants to sell 100 F-35s to European nations, it will happen. How do you imagine that will work? The US may have to lower the price more than they can afford to. Some countries have already cancelled their F-35 orders. You can't force someone to buy what they don't want.
The implications are that non financial or indirect financial leverage would be used to make you "want" to complete purchase.
Not sure if that's one factor the investigation considered. You can't wish away fact that the plane flew several minutes after he bailed.
Very hard for us to know it's complex.. We Can only guess
The entire story is pretty interesting, actually. When the pilot ejected and landed, the 911 dispatcher goes through some sort of flowchart like a call-center guy in Calcutta except at approximately 0.25x the pace https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCk3yk_38Fc (seriously, it's like watching an LLM execute on CPU). Then there's the plane that no one could find for a while Then the military said the reason they had to dem…
> (seriously, it's like watching an LLM execute on CPU). I dunno, it seems fine to me. The person starts the call by saying they need an ambulance, so she is going through trying to collect information about what the injuries are. The problem is that the pilot wanted to contact 911 to warn them about the plane crash, but somehow that got misinterpreted by the homeowner and got them on this ambulance track, and the pi…
If you hate the long form filler and know what a fighter jet is, start (with the knowledge that the pilot is landing in poor weather) at "Suddenly, at 1:32:05 p.m", read until the first two sentences in section 2, then skip to section 5. Edit: That said, there are no answers. It's just the long known story: A pilot ejects from a malfunctioning (but likely flyable) jet, gets cleared in the first two investigations bec…
Only because people aren't willing to accept the fact that this is just rank, base, bog standard, internal military politics. The pilot was probably fine until he got a new, important posting that displaced someone else and that someone else was willing to throw some elbows to get it overturned.
As for fault, the reality of the military command chain is that you are responsible for shit that goes wrong on your watch even if it isn't necessarily your fault. You can lose the ability to get important postings if something bad goes wrong even once. Generally, those people run their time out as quietly as possible and leave. It is not smart of the military, but the military isn't noted for smart.