Media keeps talking all this shit about the F-35 as if they have their hands on the schematics and what exactly is wrong with the aircraft. :P

Well the problem isn't really the design or the air frame, it's the Sunk Costs Fallacy.

They just keep sinking money into it, assuming that after spending so much money, just a little more has to get them something good.

But by this point, even if the F35 is an astounding success across the board and serves for decades upon decades it's still going to be a flop. It's never going to be worth the amount of money spent on it now, especially with the whole attempt to make it a cheap and awesome fighter for broad export like a lot of Russian and French planes.

They were trying to cut in on the Fulcrum and the Typhoon's territory and they've failed miserably.

That aside though, no one is denying that, too many European nations have invested money in the F35 series for it to fail / too big to fail. What bothers me is that every now and then the media pull something out of their ass and bring up engine troubles, or the airframe is wrong so its stealth won't function, or this, or that. All rumors. It annoys me. They've been doing it for years now.

I totally agree though. While it'll be an amazing aircraft in the long run, it won't be in service long enough for it to makeup for how much money is devoured on its way to the front line.

Heh, like the air frame will screw up the stealth aspect any more than normal operational degradation will.

The reality is it's never been too big to fail, the plane isn't the whole company. That's the problem with a sunk costs fallacy, eventually you have to realize the money you spent is going, and spending more isn't gonna get it back. You don't keep going, you stop the bleeding, this is why budgets are a thing.

It's like a slot machine, sometimes it'll pay off in a couple of coins, and it's worth the cash. But other times, well, yeah, you can ensure a win every time, eventually, if you sink more cash into it than you could ever possibly win back.

The biggest criticism has been the growing and already high costs of the F-35 plane and program. In Canada the F-35 program is an incredibly poor fit for any kind of arctic patrol with its short range and single engine design. You do not need to comb through blueprints to find fundamental problems with the plane or realize that it isn't a good fit for what is needed for the country.

Who needs that aircraft?

Lockheed Martin needs that plane... to sell. \o/

Also all the jobs.

The F-35 is a turkey, and everyone involved in it's production needs to be given a smack... -.-

They need to get laid off. =\

'Murica

Lockheed Martin and Boeing also get preferential treatment for NASA contracts.

NASA has been pretty bad for just being a vector to send jobs to different congressional districts. =\

F-35 is old news, I knew about it years ago lol

fun facts, the US spends more money on the military then the next top 10 expensive military budgets in the world combined

It kinda defeats the point of having allies if you are going to outspend everyone anyways.

There's a few theories about our overwhelmingly most peaceful period in world history and Americas spending on military, one theory is that because of the USA's large funded military, there's a central world military, sort of like a central police force, maintaining a very peaceful era instead of different countries living in paranoia of one another and dumping more money into their military for protection instead of relying on one central military for protection. Just theories anyway

There weren't any direct confrontations between the superpowers because the risk of nuclear annihilation was almost certain. It has been proxy wars after WWII between the US and USSR. It has really only been peaceful since then for few countries.

With the F-35 the forgot the Cold war adage about combat aircraft.

Design a plane to be very good at one thing, it'll be a work horse, capable of damn near everything.

Design a plane to do everything at it will suck at all those things.

We forgot how the F-111 went, the only air to air kill that air frame has ever been credited with was to a plane without any weapons.

There are the different variants of the F-35. Which... raises the question of why not have three different planes in the first place. It is striking how different each variant is to the other from a quick google search.

It is like they tried to have their cake and eat it too but instead they tripped and the cake fell to the floor.

Yeah, they did the same trying to get the F-111 to work, but the most it ever did was electronic warefare and a little low altitude bombing. Which, given it was supposed to be a cruise multi-purpose fighter is pretty shit.

Meanwhile the F-15, an air superiority fighter, has worked out for pretty much everything.

The first real multi-role fighter, the P-38, was just supposed to be a fighter. It wound up being a bomber, long range escort, and even a reconnaissance plane, specifically the rig that scouted the beaches for the D-day landings.

You just can't design an air frame for radically different purposes at the same time.

The Aardvark failed because the variable geometry was a poor design choice. Multirole aircraft are historically extremely successful when used in a strategic sense (F16 etc, which my husband works on)

I never said Multi-role aircraft weren't useful. I said that aircraft designed for multiple roles are rarely successful, or even used in most of those roles. The variable wing geometry wound up being the F-111's most successful design aspect later on, but it's expensive and more difficult to maintain, and on a big aircraft like the F-111 it wound up being useless.

But that was because it was overbuilt, designed to fullfill too many different roles, and it wound up adequately fulfilling next to none of them.

Meanwhile, the F-16 was designed to be an air superiority fighter, and evolved into a multi-role aircraft, just like the F-15, and the P-38, and the B-52, which was designed and initially operated purely as a strategic Nuclear bomber.

The F-111 meanwhile was made to be a fighter bomber, which meant it was too big to be very useful as a fighter, and too small to carry most of the larger ordinance a pure bomber could handle. It wasn't so much poorly designed as it was screwed the moment it hit the drawing board.

It's the cold war idea of putting everything into one air frame, and it never really worked out as planned. Multi-role aircraft designed as multi-role aircraft have a high chance of failing at most of their intended roles. Single purpose aircraft adapted to multiple roles, however, are usually much better due to having specific advantages that can be easily adapted to a variety of roles. Like how the F-14 was designed to intercept cruise missiles, and they found that all the things that made it good at that made it great at taking down fighters.

were getting those over here in Australia soon too. replacing our super hornets which weren't too super X3

Long live the A-10 :D

Unfortunately not.

Nope, it's still going strong :D

Officially going to be decommissioned.

Thats the word on the Hill anyway. They're chasing the Fail35 for its job creation...

Personally having sat in, fired, and buzzed around in one, I know they're going to have to crush their pilots with them, they'll never leave them.

Fuck, my bad. Missed that most recent article.
My apologies, shame to see a still used plane be shutdown for a money sink.

Anger is too soft a word for my emotion.

The Avro Arrow would of been a better choice.

Preach ON brutha. Some 'ole bullshit up in this country.

The government gave them impossible demands (stealth, VTOL, ability to perform nearly any mission) and LM failed. Hard to blame them. If LM hadn't failed the US government, someone else would have.

I'm sure the owners of Lockheed Martin are really upset that their plane doesn't perform and will cry into the billions of dollars the company will make from this deal.

That's assuming the F-35 even gets as far as it was planned to, which, considering that the Navy is looking at upgrading their existing F/A-18 fleet before acquiring the F-35C, may not happen.

Anyway, the F-35 actually had a very different airframe in the past. It looked remarkably similar to the new Chinese stealth fighter that popped up a little while ago.

That airframe, however, was scrapped when the Marine Corps demanded that it have V/STOL capabilities. This is in addition to its stealth. Those two things are great on their own, but when you put them together you get things like a canopy that doesn't allow the pilot to see behind them, or a plane that disassembles itself upon landing.

Why does the Marine Corps having a V/STOL-capable plane affect the -C and -A versions, which were to operate from carriers and airfields, respectively? Because the US Department of Defense made the decision that the Air Force, Navy, and Marines all have the same plane.

Keep in mind, this is the same company that designed the F-22, the U-2, and the SR-71. They sure as hell know how to make a plane.