441–450 of 693 posts
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Have you looked at the MiG-23 that crashed last month in Michigan?
https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/G... This one? Which reads as though the back-seater (not the pilot) was the one that ejected and took the pilot with him?
And in fact, if it's reliable, it can help saving pilots lives.
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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…
If F-35 is such a failure, how come many countries have chosen to buy it? Consulting this next page, I count 8 countries besides the US that have taken delivery of F-35s, plus many that have ordered it, but not yet taken delivery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning... The UK for example currently has a fleet of 32, and Australia has 50.
In general, even if something is awful as product and its development was a disaster, if it's monopoly on something important it is still going to sell.
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.
Here's the thing: you don't know anything about the F-35. Because the project is secret. The capabilities are secret. And in a US political system that's incredibly fractious, civilian oversight has been satisfied with the project for multiple administrations. But it's still secret.
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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…
Which the US is wholly aware of given the "Loyal Wingman" program, which the F-35 is designed to work with: commanding unmanned fighters/aircraft as support or missile trucks if what have you
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Wild Weasel literally is baiting SAM to shoot at them. That's the point of Wild Weasel, you bait the RADAR then kill the air defense before they lock in on you. Any RADAR works by emitting radio waves, and those radio waves can be tracked with a homing missile. Just looking at the wild weasel causes the RADAR system to possibly be bombed. SAM installations vs Wild Weasel tactics are very complex. In any case...if you…
Using drones to bait them like in Baghdad in 1991 would work too. How would something like that help Ukraine? Does Russia even need HARM when they have so much artillery they can just turn the surroundings of the radar site into the surface of the moon? My understanding is Ukraine preserved its air defenses by moving them right before 2/24 and is betting on Russian cruise missile avionics and military intelligence su…
F35 is better because the pilot can turn off all communications when doing the SAED mission, forcing the enemy RADAR to increase their power to even try to see the F35. I don't think drones are in a position (yet) to go radio-silent and accomplish their mission.
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I got that and I was trying to answer in the least sarcastic way I could. I’ll try again. Autopilot isn’t an all knowing AI that is better at dealing with emergency than a pilot. In the region of flight that involves a pilot ejection, especially in a plane like the F-35, the “autopilot” that would be created that could successfully scout a target area that was safe to crash in, eject the pilot, then somehow move the…
I was not thinking of some highly advanced AI, just something ultra simple like: after ejection, attempt to pitch the plane to nosedive as vertically as possible. The intent being to to crash the airplane as badly as possible to prevent the enemy from recovering anything useful from the crash site.
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> All of these TFR violations are early/inexperienced Cessna 172 pilots (or similar) who aren't up on TFRs, just lost, etc. I'm (as a German) a drone pilot myself and looking to start ultralight next year, and the topic of TFRs/NOTAMs annoys me to no end even when just flying a drone. Tons of junk, hard to parse and keep track of, and hell I get that the primary glass of aircraft is supposed to be certified, but why…
> the topic of TFRs/NOTAMs annoys me to no end even when just flying a drone. Tons of junk, hard to parse and keep track of Like many unusual situations there are usually at least two things that need to happen to cause the scenario I described: 1) Ignorance to TFRs/NOTAMS (Notice to Airman for those unfamiliar). 2) Loss of communication with the correct air traffic control. When air traffic control notices these peo…
> 1) Ignorance to TFRs/NOTAMS (Notice to Airman for those unfamiliar).
> 2) Loss of communication with the correct air traffic control.
Yeah, #1 is easy enough to happen because NOTAM (and, while we're ranting, METAR as well, or the fact that aviation still uses feet and knots despite everyone but the US and UK being on metric) is fundamentally broken, a relic of very old times that has never been updated (similar to the clusterfuck that is flight/staff planning and booking) because no one wants to invest money into upgrading all the legacy crap. So all it takes for a serious incident is a simple human error: forgetting to change a comms frequency, overlooking a NOTAM in all the spam, or accidentally using metric units.
> I point out #2 because there's likely little industry support for the approach you describe. Additionally, you add an additional safety issue because users (pilots) will learn to depend on them and the variability of cell connectivity at altitude, weather, speed, geography, etc is uncertain. Aviation doesn't like that.
I wasn't talking about commercial air flights, I was referring to the Cessna and other small-scale GA. They're barely faster than a high-speed train (an 172 manages 300 km/h, a German ICE 350 km/h, and I can use LTE in the latter), so for wide parts of any GA flight a pilot should have LTE access on their phone.
Anyway: yes, people will learn to depend on their phones/tablets to alert them if they enter a TFR zone or that they have to change their radio frequency. But ffs... the status quo leads to so many issues every year [1], because pilots have zero assistance if they're in an older plane with a classic, no-glass setup, or in a plane with a glass cockpit but no assistance. Adding a fallback option is the safer way, it avoids incidents.
And the truly safe way would be to upgrade all the legacy crap, or at least augment it in a backward-compatible way: a digital carrier in radios that can carry cryptographically signed messages for radios that signal new frequency and squawk codes, for example, that the pilot simply has to confirm and be done.
[1] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/8751/how-often-...
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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.
No, it doesn't. It failed to anticipate the large-scale transfer of Iranian loitering munitions to Russia for use in that role, it didn't underestimate their utility. And once they started showing up, the West started supplying more cost effective countermeasures, like the Gepard, which use autocannons rather than missiles.
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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 is for deleting (or helping others delete) air defenses and other fighter aircraft. Once those are gone you can use whatever you want for CAS. I can't imagine troops being so far forward that the air above is still contested.
Modern radar can detect and track low flying aircraft just fine.