Posts Tagged joint strike fighter

F-35 Can’t Fly Near Storms

From Defense Aerospace:

“It is well documented that the F-35A aircraft requires modifications for lightning protection and these modifications have not yet been completed on the two visiting Australian aircraft,” the RAAF said in a March 4 statement posted on its website.

The F-35’s continued inability to fly near thunderstorms, like its inability to take off in fog that was revealed during its six-day ferry flight to Israel in December, shows it is still severely limited in adverse-weather operations, 16 years into its development and 11 years since its first flight.

It also contradicts recent statements by senior Australian ministers, including Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who for example claimed “The F-35A is the most advanced fighter in the world,” while Defence Minister Senator Marise Payne said “The F-35A will provide the Air Force with the ability to execute air combat missions which were previously beyond our scope.”

This is terribly ironic since the aircraft’s referred to as the Lightning II.

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Canceling The F-22 Was A Mistake

From Foxtrot Alpha:

As if they suddenly came to an epiphany, the United States Air Force brass is now admitting what many of us have been screaming about for so long: We didn’t build nearly enough F-22s, and the F-35 cannot simply pick up the slack. So why aren’t those who pushed so hard to cancel the F-22 program being held accountable?

At the same time that the Raptor was coming online and proving itself, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, of both the Bush and Obama Administrations, was calling for the F-22’s demise. This was said to be due to the aircraft cost and use as “only” an air-to-air, destruction of enemy air defense, and deep strike platform.

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F-35 Makes First Carrier Landing

From DefenceIQ:

The arrested landing is part of initial at-sea Developmental Testing I (DT-I) for the F-35C, which commenced Nov. 3 and is expected to last two weeks.

The tests will measure aircraft’s integration to flight deck operations and will help further define the F-35C’s operating parameters aboard the aircraft carrier.

F-35 landing

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Joint Aircraft Are A Bad Idea

From RAND:

In short, we find no evidence that historical joint aircraft programs have saved money. We also find that joint aircraft programs have obliged the services to accept unwelcome design compromises, have contributed to the shrinking of the military aircraft industrial base, and might have heightened the strategic and operational risks for the services and their pilots. Consequently, unless the participating services have identical and stable requirements, the Defense Department should avoid taking a joint approach to acquiring future fighter and other complex aircraft.

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F-35B Begins Ship Trials

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Marines Receive First F-35Bs

From Military Times:

The Marines could start training new students to fly the F-35B in August, a senior Defense Department official had said earlier. However, currently the Pentagon has not yet formally set a date for training to start at the Florida base.

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Flaws Continue to Plague F-35

Wired’s Danger Room has the coverage on the Joint Strike Fighter and it’s many problems:

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, meant to replace nearly every tactical warplane in the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps, was already expected to cost $1 trillion dollars for development, production and maintenance over the next 50 years. Now that cost is expected to grow, owing to 13 different design flaws uncovered in the last two months by a hush-hush panel of five Pentagon experts. It could cost up to a billion dollars to fix the flaws on copies of the jet already in production, to say nothing of those yet to come.

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