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The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

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Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#881

Post by vagrantJin »

jki275 wrote: post #699
Judgmentality wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The aircraft itself is apparently excellent at what it does I have heard the opposite from a test pilot who has flown it. He fucking hates it.

A lot of highly qualified people who have flown it say otherwise. https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/f-35-faces-mos... Chip Berke is an F22 and F35 test pilot, and the first F35 Squadron commander. He's probably the most qualified person on the planet to talk about fifth gen aircraft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxK6O5--9Z0&t=203s

Dubious.

The man cannot criticize the project publicly. In fact, he and his squadron probably have real opinions that never leave their base locker rooms.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#882

Post by danjac »

greedo wrote: post #756
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can be produced cheaply because all of the life support, human facing controls, and armoring aren't included. This reduces weight which shrinks the airframe and reduces operational costs significantly.

The largest cost for a fighter is its engine, followed by radar and weaponry. The cost for including a human is a nit. And there isn't any armor in modern fighters. The A-10 has titanium , but fighter jets don't pack anything like that.

There's dollar cost, and then there's political cost. A pilot shot down and killed or captured is a political liability and military planners have to take that into account when deploying manned aircraft vs drones.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#883

Post by mechEpleb »

wcarron wrote: post #521
weaksauce wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s a shocking amount of people also happy to drive around ignoring warning lights flashing. ...or can't afford the basic maintenance

In other words, can't afford to own/operate a car. Note, that's not a put down on said people. I think it's a shame such situations exist. But, if you can't afford to pay for insurance/gas/maintenance, then you can't afford the vehicle. But, regarding flying cars: I absolutely do not want more people operating airborne spinny death machines capable of destroying considering we've already established many people don't…

The number of people who need cars to survive is far greater than the number of people who can afford to fix every nuisance fault. So long as it can keep rolling and comply with whatever minimum safety requirements actually get enforced, people will run it.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#884

Post by imtringued »

brianwawok wrote: post #620
bpodgursky wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next-gen bomber program (B-21) as far as I'm aware is also going well. Fast purchase of an a platform intentionally only incrementally more advanced than the current model.

Does it have a human pilot? Any combat aircraft project with a human on board should be stopped. It has no hope of long term parity of a drone controlled airplane without having to cart around meat bags with limited speed and turning power.

This meme needs to end. It's a damn bomber. The by far biggest problem is that a pilot needs to eat and go to the toilet multiple times during a 20 hour mission and he will be exhausted by the end of the mission.

Repeating the same old "lol quadrocopter go 2000g brrrrrt" meme just makes you look stupid.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#885

Post by imtringued »

freeopinion wrote: post #564
nerdponx wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But imagine if we put people to work building useful stuff instead of useless stuff. Power grid infrastructure, new bridges, new rail lines, etc.

Grid infrastructure and rail lines jump to my mind often in these discussions. I am reminded how we got existing rail line through much of the U.S. 19th century land acquisition for private parties who built that infrastructure is easy to spin as a travesty. In many cases it was blatant corruption. And the legacy lasts to this day. All of that land and infrastructure is still privately owned. Fast forward to today. I…

>Fast forward to today. Is it right that the government should build infrastructure to compete with existing private businesses? Should they build and operate grocery stores? Automakers? ISPs? Textile factories?

There is absolutely nothing wrong with building public infrastructure considering in many cases the infrastructure in question would form a natural monopoly. However, car manufacturers, grocers, textile factories have lots of competition. Those markets are very healthy.

American ISPs fail to provide good service even in wealthy locations. Google had to stop their gigabit fiber rollout. That's definitively a failing market where a baseline of service should be provided by governments. Private companies can always provide superior service and charge for it.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#886

Post by imtringued »

chrisco255 wrote: post #787
mikepurvis wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of us would love to believe this, and yet what does the unrestrained private sector churn out? Ad networks, app addiction, gig economy, throwaway culture, urban sprawl, climate apathy... hardly a winner. SpaceX is everyone's favourite private sector success story, but they're basically just a younger, leaner version of Lockheed— surviving off of NASA and doing what they're contracted to do. I don't think the pri…

I'd love to come up with examples as I type this to you from an open source web browser on a smart phone that contains more functionality than $20K worth of equipment did with more processing power than what all of NASA had in the 70s and access to more information than President Reagan had in the 80s and a faster throughput than anyone had in the 90s all hosted on a self made website by a startup platform helped fun…

>Another Musk inspired project is the hyperloop

He just took the 100 year old vac train concept and repackaged it. Back in his original pitch he constantly said and laughed how easy it is. Once the years went by he slowly backed off from every promise and ultimately reduced his involvement to 0.

> of course the Boring tunnels for electric cars.

He promised to make tunnel boring cheaper, yet his only tunnel costs exactly as much as every other tunnel. He constantly advertises 150mph travel when the tunnel isn't even long enough to reach that speed. Have you seen the tunnel? It's so tiny you can't even open your doors if you get stuck in there. If even a single car fire starts in that tunnel everyone in the tunnel will die.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#887

Post by imtringued »

adolph wrote: post #616
wongarsu wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communism had a great many failings, but they did allocate a lot of money to infrastructure and science. But what real communism did isn't even relevant here, I'm pretty sure GP is talking about imaginary communism in the sense that anything that is good for the general population is somehow called communism in US politics.

In any economic system political aspects have a tendency to reduce the information available to consumers and producers. This is often done with laudable intent leading to terrible outcomes. In Soviet Communism the information feedback loop was so disconnected it resembled the theory of an AI "paperclip apocalypse"[1]. From 0: The Soviet whalers, Berzin wrote, had been sent forth to kill whales for little reason othe…

The real solution involves a hybrid system where the government supports a baseline of services. Mostly food, water, shelter, electricity, roads, etc. The private sector's responsibility is to provide superior service above and beyond what the government is doing.

Pure communists think that the government baseline should be enough for everyone, even if it means inferior service.

Pure capitalists think that superior service should be enough for everyone, even if it is unaffordable.

The obvious answer is to find the middle ground and reap the benefits of both.

I personally don't think that the F-35 is falling into that. A jobs program fighter jet doesn't really make sense since it is not a long term investment with a direct return. It's more of an insurance policy against an imaginary foe. Yes, you have jets but unless you use them to conquer land or defend yourself there is no direct return on investment.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#888

Post by cm2187 »

misiti3780 wrote: post #86

The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost. This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chan…

When it matters, I think we have shown to be perfectly capable of moving fast. Just look at how quickly we came up with a vaccine for covid. In a state of war (or cold war, or pandemic) you cut the red tape. Approval processes that typically take weeks magically take only hours.

But it is true that when there is no particular urgency, the multiplication of bureaucracy and regulations compounded with the complexity of modern technologies makes it difficult to deliver cheap and fast.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#889

Post by rbanffy »

cgearhart wrote: post #200
supernova87a wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe someone with more industry knowledge or interesting sources can corroborate -- But I believe that one of the things that happened to the military aviation industrial complex was that in the WW2, early Cold War era, planes and military development programs were very much driven by individuals or very small teams responsible for designing the requirements, overseeing the planning, and the outcome of new aircraft.…

At least three things happened: - congressional oversight increased, with the result that the purchasing authority is no longer generally the end user. We aren’t just buying a ship (plane, gun, etc.), we’re maintaining a logistics and manufacturing industrial base to produce that type of item (and maintain jobs in congressional districts). So maybe we should buy a few more tanks/ships/bombs than we need so that we do…

> - complexity increased

The US almost never operates in contested airspace. For that, the F-35 (as the F-22 before it) is overkill.

Do you see a need for manned weapon systems that can survive engagement with other manned weapon systems in the near future? I'm thinking semi-autonomous drones can replace a lot of such systems and, if you can build them quickly and cheaply enough (as in it takes a $1M missile from a $50M plane to down a $1M drone), then you can build lots and lots of them to overwhelm your opponents.

Re: The U.S. Air Force just admitted the F-35 stealth fighter has failed

#890

Post by rbanffy »

paulmd wrote: post #660
misiti3780 wrote: post #86

The saddest thing about all of this IMO is they have been working on this for 14 years, and how much money was spent/wasted? Now, read about Skunkworks - they were able to build the SR71 (without supercomputers) in less than half that time and for a fraction of the cost. This isn't just planes, this seems to be everything nowadays. Fission was discovered in 1938/1939 and we dropped two bombs on Japan in 1945. No chan…

Part of the problem is that the F-35 was pitched as saving money by doing everything for everyone. It was going to be a lightweight fighter with carrier-landing durability (contradictory) that had options for both single-engine, multi-engine, and VTOL engine (all contradictory), with a big-wing and small-wing version, that could be a quasi-air-superiority, quasi-guided-missile, quasi-bomb-truck, or even wild-weasel/S…

> It does one thing well

The importance of this engineering principle cannot be overstated. It applies to everything - from home appliances to spacecraft to software.

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